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JOSEPH H. ODELL 





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eOPXIUGHT DEPOSIT. 



The New Spirit 

of 
The New Army 



The New Spirit 

of 

The New Army 



A MESSAGE TO THE 
"SERFICE FLAG " HOMES 



By 
JOSEPH H. ODELL 



With an Introduction by 
NEWTON D. BAKER 

Secretary of War 




New York Chicago Toronto 
Fleming H. Revell Company 

London and Edinburgh 



Copyright, 1918, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 






New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago; 17 North Wabash Ave. 
Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W. 
London: 21 Paternoster Square 
Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street 

MAR 13 1918 
©CI.A494067 



To the memory 

of 

Lieutenant W, W. Odell, M. C. 

ptk Sherwood Foresters, B. E. R 

who fell m 
Flanders, October Fourth, igij 

while gallantly 

leading his men in an attack 

upon the German trenches 



The White House, Washington 
To the Soldiers of the National Army: 

" You are undertaking a great duty. The heart 
of the whole country is with you. Everything 
that you do will be watched with the deepest in- 
terest and with the deepest solicitude not only by 
those who are near and dear to you, but by the 
whole nation besides. For this great w^ar draws 
us all together, makes us all comrades and 
brothers, as all true Americans felt themselves to 
be when we first made good our national inde- 
pendence. The eyes of all the world will be upon 
you, because you are in some special sense the sol- 
diers of freedom. 

*' Let it be your pride, therefore, to show all 
men everywhere not only what good soldiers you 
are, but also what good men you are, keeping your- 
selves fit and straight in everything and pure and 
clean through and through. Let us set for our- 
selves a standard so high that it will be a glory 
to live up to it and then let us live up to it and 
add a new laurel to the crown of America. 

" My affectionate confidence goes with you in 
every battle and every test. God keep and guide 
you!" 

WooDBOw Wilson. 



Introduction 

WHEN this war is over and the men 
and women of America have had 
an opportunity to obtain a per- 
spective on its conduct and results, there will 
be an adequate appreciation of Dr. Odell's 
statement about Camp Hancock : *' I would 
rather intrust the moral character of my boy 
to that camp than to any college or uni- 
versity I know. This does not cast any un- 
usually dark shadow upon the educational 
institutions of the country, but they have 
never possessed the absolute power that is 
now held by the War Department." 

Camp Hancock is by no means unique in 
the quality that inspired this expression of 
praise. The training camps that are fitting 
our men, both of the army and navy, to fight 
for the cause of democracy are builders of 
moral as well as physical stamina. 

These chapters interested me greatly when 
in part they first appeared in The Outlook, 
for I found in them a complete understand- 
ing of the work of the War Department 
Commission on Training Camp Activities. 
7 



8 INTRODUCTION 

The scope of the Commission's activities is 
even wider than is indicated here, and its 
work is growing rapidly. Special library 
buildings have been built at the camps, and 
the American Library Association has un- 
dertaken the work of conducting them. 
Camp theatres seating audiences of three 
thousand have been erected, and the men 
are enjoying the best theatrical performances 
at prices of from ten to twenty-five cents. 
Eminent actors and managers are coopera- 
ting with us in this field. 

Cooperation, indeed, has marked the work 
of the Commission at every turn. Ameri- 
cans acknowledge their debt to the soldier ; 
they believe in him, and in return the soldier 
believes in his mission. For a succinct 
statement of the value of this work, I cannot 
improve on what Dr. Odell says : 

*' If Germany should crumble before these 
men should get into action, if we have lav- 
ished billions of dollars to train men for bat- 
tles they will never fight, yet the money has 
been well spent, and I consider it the best 
investment in citizenship the country could 
have made.'^ 

Newton D. Baker, 
Secretary of War, 

Washington^ January 14^ igrS, 



Foreword 

AMERICA is on trial in the court of 
the nations. Democracy has set 
forth to prove its fitness to determine 
world affairs. For many years Europe has 
taken us at our own valuation and has con- 
ceded our efficiency, resourcefulness and de- 
cisiveness. To a very large degree — perhaps 
to the point of peril — we have accepted our- 
selves at our own valuation, and we have 
been more than content with the audit. This 
war has been merciless toward illusions. 
One question is now paramount in every 
mind : Will America stand the test ? Our 
allies look to us for the final contribution 
toward winning the war. There is nothing 
fictitious in this attitude, nothing of mere 
courtesy or flattery ; the responsible states- 
men of Great Britain, France and Italy, 
frankly acknowledge their dependence upon 
the United States. We have responded 
with a solemn pledge to use our utmost re- 
sources to meet the demand. Three years 
and a half of heroic and ghastly struggle and 
9 



10 FOEEWORD 

the outpouring of millions of lives will have 
been in vain unless we can mobilize our 
moral and material forces and rush them 
rapidly to the support of our gallant allies. 
Liberty and justice cannot be preserved to 
mankind by phraseology. America must be 
the victor or the victim in this death-grapple 
with autocracy. 

Our first and greatest asset is the quality 
of our manhood. Russia has failed, not for 
lack of quantity in man-power, but because of 
a flaw in its quality. We are perfectly right 
in the confidence that the traditions and cus- 
toms and habits of a normal state of society 
entitle us to expect victory. But with hun- 
dreds of thousands of men torn from the 
normal state of society new perils arise. 
Military establishments have always been 
the easy prey of moral vampires. Our prob- 
lem is : How to keep our splendid one-hun- 
dred per cent, manhood at the one-hundred 
per cent, level of efficiency ? No other nation 
has yet succeeded in doing that. I think we 
shall succeed, and mainly because of the re- 
markable work of the Commission on Train- 
ing Camp Activities. 

During my tour of the training camps and 
cantonments I gave my attention to the 
morals and the morale of our army, leaving 



FOEEWOEI) 11 

the material equipment and accoutrement for 
another occasion or for a different investi- 
gator. I asked no questions about blankets, 
clothing, small arms or artillery. The fol- 
lowing chapters are the record of a first hand 
investigation, made without prejudice or pre- 
dilection, for the purpose of telling the millions 
of relatives and friends of the soldiers what 
camp life and the military regime are doing 
for the young manhood of the nation. The 
editors of The Outlook asked me to write im- 
partially and frankly, condemning things bad 
as freely as praising things good. I am 
happy to say that I found very little deserv- 
ing of condemnation. The marvellous co- 
operation of the military authorities and the 
various voluntary agencies has produced a 
moral and social environment for our troops 
in training which is unparallelled in history. 

From the time the articles began to appear 
in The Outlook I have had numerous letters 
confirming my general conclusions. Parents, 
brothers, sisters, wives and sweethearts may 
rest assured that every possible safeguard is 
being placed around the character of their 
dear ones. Indeed, more than this, every 
conceivable incentive is being summoned or 
created to stimulate a healthy moral life in 
our citizen-soldiers. Of course, there are 



12 FOEEWOED 

isolated details or detachments of men for 
whom little can be done in an organized 
way, but in the great camps and canton- 
ments it is difficult to conceive how anything 
more could be done. Whatever may be said 
of our material preparedness, it is certain 
that the moral resources of the nation have 
become swiftly and effectively available in 
this period of crisis. 

Joseph H. Odell. 
Troy, N. V. 





Contents 




I. 


The Soul of the Soldier 


15 


II. 


The Miracle of Democracy . 


35 


III. 


Democratizing the Army to Save 
Democracy .... 


59 


IV. 


The Men Behind the Men Who 






Fight the Huns 


75 


V. 


Making Democracy Safe for the 






Soldier . ; . . . 


95 


VI. 


Will America Fail? 


III 



13 



The Soul of the Soldier 



THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIER 

OF our present army on foreign serv- 
ice, or in training at home, more 
than one million enlisted ; the bal- 
ance were drafted. In the National Army 
cantonments there is a spirit of contentment 
and cooperation just as hearty as that which 
is evident in the National Guard and Regular 
Army camps. If we could get a composite 
picture of the motives which led to the mil- 
lion or more voluntary enlistments we might 
have a glimpse of the seed which is growing 
into the soul of the American soldier. But 
the men will not answer a questionaire with 
simplicity and frankness ; perhaps, not being 
trained psychologists, they cannot. Their 
answers are humorous, or evasive, or repre- 
sent the mood of the passing moment, or 
their powers of composition fail them in try- 
ing to describe a set of mixed or complex 
motives. I have questioned them directly 
and indirectly, and the answers seemed to 
simmer down to this : they were caught in a 
17 



18 THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIEE 

movement which they did not try to resist. 
" Everybody was doing it ; " "I didn't want 
to be left out of the show ; " " Seemed to be 
the only thing to do ; " " Every decent chap 
ought to fight when his country is at war ; " 
** Thought it would be a fine experience." 
Among the enlisted men I have not found 
one who flamed out with righteous indigna- 
tion, or who proclaimed himself ready to die 
for civilization, or who professed a passion 
for making the world safe for democracy, or 
who posed as a St. George to save Belgium 
or France from the Hohenzollern dragon. 
Yet all of this proves nothing except that the 
seed of the soldier soul, like all other seed, 
prefers to germinate out of sight. 

Whenever I have talked at any length 
with individuals or groups of men they have 
showed an eagerness to know about German 
atrocities. Was it true that children's hands 
had been hacked of!, that nuns had been 
violated, that Canadian soldiers had been 
crucified, that the girls and women of the 
Somme district had been carried away by 
the Huns for unspeakable purposes, that the 
wounded in the hospitals had been deliber- 
ately shelled ? They wanted details of these 
things, I found, to confirm their convictions 
of horror created by the better known out- 



THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIER 19 

rages, such as the sinking of the Lusitania^ 
the bombing of London and the firing upon 
the life- boats of torpedoed ships. Then, al- 
most invariably, they expressed a lurid desire 
to be introduced to the Kaiser or the chinless 
Crown Prince. So I have been forced to the 
conclusion that the motive which they did 
not or could not express was an instinctive 
revolt against the brutality of misdirected 
force. They were dimly conscious that some 
horrible evil was moving out against every- 
thing decent and honorable in the world 
and because the European nations could not 
defeat the thing alone America must help. 
It was a hard and dirty piece of work, but it 
had to be done, and they were willing to lend 
a hand. But I found very little exaltation of 
spirit and practically no spread-eagle pa- 
triotism ; they were calmly bent upon busi- 
ness. 

Of course this does not mean that they 
never feel the thrill of a spiritual purpose. 
It simply means that passionate and con- 
suming motives were not the original in- 
centive to their enlistment. In the camps 
and cantonments there is a well defined plan 
for lifting the thoughts of the men to a high 
level. Speakers such as ex- Presidents Roose- 
velt and Taft, Dr. Henry van Dyke, Henry 



20 THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIER 

Morganthau, Newell Dwight Hillis and 
Harry Lauder unfold the causes and mean- 
ing of the war to the men and thousands of 
them are caught as by an inspiration, lifted 
completely out of the routine drudgery of 
their training and come from the meetings 
with their ideas lustred by a holy purpose. 
Slowly but surely, even the dullest among 
them are realizing the spiritual significance 
of the task before them. I saw this illus- 
trated during an evening of community 
singing. Hundreds of men sang " Tipper- 
ary " with mechanical indifference ; they put 
a little more verve into " Over There," reel- 
ing off the last two lines of the chorus with 
a tempo like the snapping of firecrackers ; 
they sang " Keep the Home Fires Burning '* 
with the touch of entreaty which it requires ; 
but when the leader gave out " The Battle 
Hymn of the Republic," they took it up and 
carried it through with a reverent enthu- 
siasm. 

** Let us sing the last verse again," said 
the leader. " Listen, boys, while I read it to 
you ; it is wonderful : " 

** In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born 
across the sea. 
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures 
you and me : 



THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIEE 21 

As He died to make men holy, let us die to 
make men free, 

While God is marching on." 

A thrill ran through the building as the men 
sang ; they showed their response in their 
faces and their voices. 

The note of vicarious sacrifice had been 
struck. After noticing this among troops 
who had been less than two months in train- 
ing camp and three thousand miles from the 
fighting front, it is not difficult to believe the 
British chaplain, Thomas Tiplady, when he 
says that the favorite hymn of the London 
regiments during the terrific battle of the 
Somme was : 

** When I survey the wondrous cross 
On which the Prince of Glory died, 
My richest gain I count but loss, 
And pour contempt on all my pride." 

Such experiences do not negative the ear- 
lier statement concerning the general stolidity 
of our men, but they point out that " the 
hard and dirty piece of work in which they 
are to lend a hand " may be lighted up occa- 
sionally by a nobler beam. 

This brings us squarely to the question of 
the religion of the camps. Is there any? 
Of course. What is it like ? Well, it is so 



22 THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIEE 

much like religion everywhere and yet so un- 
like religion anywhere that it is peculiarly 
difficult to define. The first thing that 
strikes one is that the religion of the camps 
is more intimately a part of the daily life of 
the men there than it is in other places. A 
man can live in a civilian community for 
months and absolutely avoid any contact 
with organized and articulate religion ; a 
soldier cannot live for a day in a camp or 
cantonment without being in touch with 
something closely identified with religion. 
A man can work in a mill or factory for a 
lifetime and never see an authorized repre- 
sentative of Christianity about the plant ; in 
the army the chaplain is one of his officers. 
And the chaplain, if he is worthy of his of- 
fice, finds a score of ways of coming into the 
lives of the men. A real chaplain is as val- 
uable an asset as the regiment has ; a lazy or 
incompetent chaplain is worse than an incu- 
bus. But at any rate the chaplain is as much 
a part of the organization as the adjutant or 
the officer of the day. 

But with and behind the chaplain there are 
the Young Men's Christian Association and 
the Knights of Columbus. The buildings in 
which these institutions do their work are 
dotted about the camp, close to barracks or 



THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIER 23 

tents, and the soldiers cannot move a hun- 
dred yards without seeing them. They are 
not closed nine-tenths of the time as are the 
churches at home. No one needs to change 
his clothing to enter them. Moreover, they 
are so interwoven with the normal life of the 
soldier that they seem to be his own, as noth- 
ing else in camp is his own. And they stand 
for religion. He writes his letters from the 
same bench as the one he uses in listening to 
a sermon ; he plays games under the same 
roof that shelters him in receiving the Sacra- 
ment or Mass ; he sees a thrilling movie in 
the same place in which he sings the hymns 
he learned in childhood ; the same secretary 
who referees a wrestling match or a boxing 
bout talks to him later about God. There is 
nothing remote or separate or esoteric or 
mythical about this religion ; it fits into the 
order of the day as naturally as the meals in 
the mess-room ; it interweaves itself with the 
common occupations of his leisure hours. 
The church in the home community never 
did that ; no man ever thought of dropping 
into it to smoke and chat, to write a letter to 
his sweetheart, to laugh at Charlie Chaplin, 
to see a couple of local champions spar for 
the honors of the ring. 

Other distinctions fade also. The lines be- 



24 THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIER 

tween the Protestant, the Catholic and the 
Hebrew remain but they are not emphasized 
and they are never exaggerated. But among 
Protestants the denominational fences are en- 
tirely gone. Common sense has done in a 
month what committees on comity could not 
have accomplished in a millennium. A strict 
Baptist mother visited her son in one of the 
cantonments on a recent Sunday. She was 
deeply solicitous that her boy should receive 
proper religious instruction. ** Was there a 
Baptist preacher in camp ? " He did not 
know, but he would inquire. Yes, one was 
to hold a service that afternoon and give an 
address in a distant Young Men's Christian 
Association hut. They trudged over together 
and heard an inspiring address on how Christ 
is always the Comrade of every man who 
fights for truth and righteousness and how 
He is their Companion even when they are 
not conscious of His presence. " He walked 
with the two disciples on the road to Em- 
maus although they did not recognize Him ; 
He was with Mary by the sepulchre early in 
the morning when she thought He was only 
the gardener ; He broke bread with His dis- 
ciples before they knew it was He." And, 
the speaker continued, " He is near you 
and with you even though you do not see 



THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIER 25 

Him ; you will find Him on the ocean as you 
are going over there ; He will creep along 
with you when you go out on duty over * No 
Man's Land ' ; He will spring over the top 
with you when you go into battle ; He will 
never leave you nor forsake you." The dear 
old mother was delighted and told the 
preacher how happy she was that her son 
could hear such good Baptist doctrine. 
•* But, Madam/' said the speaker, ** I am not 
a Baptist but an Episcopalian." Later the 
son said, ** Mother, I took the Sacrament 
from that man this morning." " Never 
mind," she said, " it sounded all right and 
my heart tells me it must be right. What he 
said was too good not to be true." 

And the kind of preaching to which the 
men respond ? Of course, it goes without 
saying that the " Dear Brethren " sort of sen- 
timentalists get scant attention. Men who 
are preparing to meet the machine gun spray 
and stand up against gas and liquid fire are 
not interested in spiritual cosmetics. Curi- 
ously, also, the typical, flamboyant, " Believe 
or be Damned " kind of evangelist, with his 
dogmatic theology and his shibboleth tests, 
makes little impression. Dr. John Timothy 
Stone, who is doing very effective work in 
Camp Grant as religious director, writes to me 



26 THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIER 

of his experience to this effect : " The soldier 
must see the man before he sees the religion 
the man is trying to present. He believes 
that a man should have breadth of view as 
to the convictions of others, but must sound 
no uncertain note as to his own firm belief. 
Naturalness in a speaker is also an essential. 
We find that a few earnest words put in ten 
Vr twelve minutes are of far more value than 
lengthy expositions or drawn-out addresses." 
The hundreds of thousands of men in the 
training camps are elemental : they have 
broken away or have been torn away from 
the elaborate artificialities of community life ; 
they are getting ready for a very elemental 
thing — killing the other man or being killed 
by the other man. They are in no mood for 
the extraneous or the artificial in religion. 
Speakers like Sherwood Eddy, Harry E. 
Fosdick, Grenfell, van Dyke, Cadman and 
Ralph Connor reach them instantly because 
they deal with the imperative things of the 
soul and they recognize the kind of soul with 
which they have to deal. Words that are 
simple, direct, earnest and freighted with a 
vivid and vital personal experience grip the 
men instantly. They are modest also and 
too busy learning the elements of soldiering, 
digging trenches and obeying imperative 



THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIER 27 

orders, to be moved by mock heroics. They 
do not want to be magnified and glorified 
into saviors of humanity ; at least, not yet, 
not till they have actually come to grips with 
the Hun. 

Possibly the most obvious feature of camp 
preaching is its practical application. It is a 
dynamic intended to produce an ethic. Its 
aim is not the discussion of a subject but the 
attaining of an object. If an attempt is made 
to stir the emotions it is done that the emo- 
tions may direct the will and issue in char- 
acter and conduct. Hence one hears nothing 
about predestination but much about prayer, 
little about doctrines but a great deal about 
duty. For instance, there are many ways of 
defending men from the evils of immorality. 
The Commission on Training Camp Activities 
is using all the resources of the Federal Gov- 
ernment in war time to suppress the tempta- 
tions in the near-by communities ; the Medical 
Corps of the army is placing literature in the 
hands of the men dealing with the physical 
perils of sexual indiscretion, also the same 
Department is treating the exposed cases in 
such a manner that the consequent physical 
evils are prevented ; the Young Men's Chris- 
tian Association and the chaplains, while 
working whole-heartedly with the authorities 



28 THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIEE 

in these measures, are taking the highest 
moral grounds in dealing with the men. I 
heard the subject dealt with in a religious 
talk in one of the buildings. The speaker 
said : " Men, the thing is wrong and you 
know it is wrong. It is just as wrong if you 
don't get caught as if you do. It is like 
stealing or lying or killing — those things are 
bad whether you are found out or not. 
Adultery is a breaking of God's law and you 
never break God's law without breaking 
your own manhood. You must stand up 
and fight every evil desire, because to give 
in is wrong — it is wrong toward God, toward 
the woman — whether she is a professional or 
not — it is wrong toward yourself, it is wrong 
toward the army, it is wrong toward every- 
thing decent in human society." When we 
were coming out I heard one enlisted man 
say, " He's got our number ; but there ain't 
any use arguing about that, he's dead right." 
In the matter of liquor the men have realized 
that their enforced abstinence has produced 
nothing but beneficial results. There is not 
much need to preach on that subject. It is 
amazing how the desire has almost died out 
with the abolition of temptation. I sat one 
evening with a group of officers and discussed 
the subject. Not one of them had been a 



THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIER 29 

total abstainer until the Federal Law went 
into effect ; two of them confessed that they 
had never missed an opportunity to drink 
within reasonable limits; they all admitted 
that since they knew they could not have it 
they had practically ceased to desire it. Of 
course, I do not mean that the army is ab- 
solutely bone-dry, but the drinking is reduced 
to an unbelievable minimum. What there is 
of it comes through the mistaken kindness of 
friends. In the first period of the canton- 
ments there was considerable boot-legging in 
Trenton and Lowell, but the authorities have 
grown vigilant and the scoundrels timid. No, 
it is friends of the men who are the worst of- 
fenders. " Poor devils 1 " they argue. ** Can't 
get much fun in those dreary camps ; let's give 
them a ray of good cheer." Then they buy 
a flask and push it into the coat of the soldier. 
Now, the psychology of the flask is not prop- 
erly understood. It is usually inferior whiskey ; 
it contains just too much to drink within a 
limited time, but not sufficient to share with 
another; there is likely to be enough left in 
the bottle, after the soldier has had about as 
much as he really wants, to put him out of 
business, but it is too precious to throw away, 
therefore he drinks it ; its consumption takes 
him into back alleys and dark places, where 



30 THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIEE 

other perils lurk. A man may keep his man- 
hood standing at a bar and drinking a glass 
of beer, but the flask rots out his self-respect 
and honor and courage, leaving him a sneak 
as well as an offender against military law. 
If the good-natured friend of the soldier once 
comes to understand what he is doing, he will 
cut out this peculiarly vicious form of treating. 
There are all kinds of men in the training 
camps as there are everywhere else. There 
are men with the morals of a mud turtle and 
the vision of a bat, but there are also multi- 
tudes who are spreading the contagion of a 
splendid manhood through the barracks. 
Some will come back to civil life unimproved, 
but they are the ones who would go to the 
devil on a desert island. But many, many 
thousands will testify in years to come that 
the first glimpse they ever had of the possible 
beauty and grandeur of life came from as- 
sociation with their comrades in camp. For 
example, in Camp Devens there are numbers 
of men who came from the textile cities of 
New England, where socially, economically 
and morally they were pre-damned ; they 
have never had a chance to know anything 
or be anything. But in Camp Devens, not 
counting the commissioned officers or the 
personnel of the Depot Brigade, there are 



THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIER 31 

six hundred and ninety-five college men rep- 
resenting twenty-seven New England col- 
leges and universities. They are the best of 
our race, the flowering of the purest and 
sanest homes, men who could found another 
New England as their forefathers did three 
hundred years ago. They were drafted into 
service and their influence upon the thou- 
sands of other men is already having a 
marked effect. 

Few people, even among our political and 
moral economists, realize the influence of tak- 
ing a million and a half men out of our com- 
petitive system and placing them under the 
law of cooperation. When the men under- 
stand that their messmates are not trying to 
steal their jobs or get their money they 
haven't the slightest objection to doing kindly 
and generous things for one another. The 
complexion of their world has changed and 
they change with it. When they see that 
the best men in camp are not ashamed to be 
decent they want to be decent too ; when 
they find that some are not afraid to pray 
they are willing to pray also. Two men 
went to the Young Men's Christian Associa- 
tion director in Camp Devens and said they 
were in the habit of kneeling down and say- 
ing their prayers every night at home. 



32 THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIER 

What ought they to do here ? " Try it out/' 
was the advice. They did ; the second night 
two others in the barracks joined them ; the 
third night a few more ; gradually the num- 
ber increased until considerably more than 
half of the men resumed the habit of child- 
hood and knelt by their cots in prayer before 
turning in. A company captain, in one of 
the cantonments, the first evening his men 
stood at attention for retreat, said, "Men, this 
is a serious business we are engaged in ; it is 
fitting that we should pray about it." There 
and then, this Plattsburg Reserve officer made 
a simple and earnest prayer for the Divine 
Blessing upon their lives and their work. 
The impression upon the men was described 
to me as tremendous. Such incidents, al- 
though not common, indicate the general 
spirit of the new armies ; the better men and 
the men of ampler early opportunities are al- 
ready exercising a refining and an uplifting 
influence upon their less favored fellows. 
Old misunderstandings and prejudices are 
passing away ; social distinctions are giving 
way to a new solidarity ; individual good- 
ness, repressed for lack of an encouraging 
environment, is coming frankly to view. The 
efTect upon the favorites of fortune is no less 
marked than upon the men who came from 



THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIER 33 

mean streets and stifling tenements. A 
young millionaire, whose most serious busi- 
ness in life had been buying automobiles and 
raising fancy stock on a country estate, was 
doing manful work as a corporal in a Supply 
Company. " This is the real thing, after all,'* 
he said to me. A Princeton graduate of 'i6, 
now a Reserve officer, said that his company, 
in six weeks, had gathered more spirit for 
team work than his college class had genera- 
ted up to the middle of the Junior year. 
" How did they do it ? " I asked. *' They all 
started on the same level and aimed for the 
same end. There has been nothing to pull 
them apart in cliques, rather everything binds 
them together. They have picked up speed 
and snap ; nothing can stop them now. And 
I haven't seen any of the little meannesses so 
common in a college." 

So there are a hundred reciprocal influences 
playing on the men all the time ; some are 
being remade, others modified ; many who 
had never known the impelling force of a 
great motive or the alluring spell of a high 
ideal have found both in the purpose and 
spirit of the new army. When I began my 
investigation of the camps my proclaimed 
aim was to discover, not what kind of sol- 
diers Uncle Sam would send to France, but 



34 THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIEE 

what kind of men Uncle Sam would send 
back to their homes and their communities 
after the war is over. I have discovered 
both ; for in making better men we are mak- 
ing finer soldiers, and in making efficient 
soldiers we are producing a higher type of 
men — healthier physically, broader mentally 
and nobler spiritually. If Germany should 
crumble before these men can get into action, 
if we have lavished billions of dollars to train 
men for batdes they will never fight, yet the 
money has been well spent and I consider it 
the best investment in citizenship the country 
could have made. 



II 

The Miracle of Democracy 



11 

THE MIRACLE OF DEMOCRACY 

AN old time Regular Army officer 
stood watching thousands of drafted 
men straggle into camp. It was 
pouring a cold, unintermittent rain from 
leaden skies. The men were cluttered with 
suit cases and bundles ; they were drenched 
to the skin and in a stunned and surly 
mood ; some of them, from the industrial 
centres, were in the moral and physical 
reaction of heavy farewell drinking. And 
the cantonment was scarcely half-finished ; 
the barracks were bleak and desolate barns ; 
the roads were ankle deep in mud ; one of 
the dishevelled batches of men wandered for 
miles about the camp before it could find 
quarters ; most of the officers were as remote 
from orientation as the men. The Regular 
Army man knitted his brows and there was 
anxiety in his eyes. '* We shall have to 
build a barbed wire entanglement twenty 
feet high and ten feet deep around the camp 
to keep these men from deserting in a body," 
he said. 

37 



38 THE MIEACLE OF DEMOCEACY 

Undoubtedly the outlook was ominous 
enough. Forty thousand men torn from 
their familiar haunts, their accustomed ways, 
their lifelong environment, and pitched to- 
gether into a wilderness of unsightly and 
comfortless shacks, under orders which they 
could not dispute and from which they could 
not appeal, to do things they had never done 
before and which they would never do of 
their own accord — surely it was a perilous 
venture for democracy. A callow youth from 
the farm sat next at mess to the habitue of 
the Tenderloin, mother's darling from the 
suburb bunked beside the gunman from the 
underworld, the e^xclusive fraternity man 
from the exclusive college stood at attention 
between two grimy immigrants who could 
speak no EngHsh, the bootblack and the 
bartender flanked the immaculate banker. 
Forty thousand of them and in their midst 
every centrifugal element of personality 
known to a complex and experimental social 
organism, yet with nothing to keep them 
from flying into forty thousand separate 
human atoms except an Act of Congress. 

The Regular Army officer is not to be 
called a fool for thinking that barbed wire 
would have to supplement legislation. He 
was wrong, utterly and emphatically wrong, 



THE MIRACLE OF DEMOCRACY 39 

and probably no one rejoices more than he 
over the falsifying of his prophecy. That 
welter of dissimilar, divergent and dangerous 
units of humanity has been made to coalesce 
into an obedient and cheerful army. Within 
thirty days each regiment and battalion and 
company had an esprit de corps which was 
obvious even to the casual observer. At 
Camp Devens three men from the Depot 
Brigade, after seven weeks of training, re- 
vealed their minds to me without reserve. 

"We are moving out next week," they 
said, ** going to one of the Southern canton- 
ments." 

I congratulated them, telling them of the 
warm climate, the blue skies and the beauti- 
ful scenery. To my surprise they were in a 
mood of resentment. 

" But we don't want to go," they objected. 
" It's awfully cold here and no heat in the 
barracks, but we like it. We know our way 
around, we've got lots of pals in the camp, 
the Y always has something good going on, 
and the officers are white. Why can't they 
let us stay ? " 

One of them had been a shipping clerk in 
a wholesale grocery, another was a member 
of the Typographical Union and the third 
had worked in an automobile repair shop. 



40 THE MIEACLE OF DEMOCEACY 

"What do you like best about the life 
here?" I asked. 

The answers were dissimilar in form but 
the substance was the same, translated thus : 
" We started out to learn to do something 
and to be something and we can see that we 
are making progress." 

The shipping clerk made an illuminating 
contribution : ** Everybody at home sym- 
pathized with me when I was drafted. They 
said the officers would grind me down with 
drills and orders until I was only a mechan- 
ical number. You bet I hated to come, but 
the scare tales were all fakes — if a fellow does 
his duty he's treated like a man, exactly the 
same as in business." 

But the most important remark came from 
the linotype man : *' Back home I didn't pay 
much attention to the war because it seemed 
so far away. The man who worked on the 
machine next to mine was a socialist. He 
was a great reader. He said he had read 
everything on both sides and that Germany 
wasn't understood in this country because 
all our news was doctored by English in- 
fluence. His conclusion was that the war 
was a rivalry between competing monopolies 
and this country sided with England because 
our monopolists stood to win most if Ger- 



THE MIRACLE OF DEMOCRACY 41 

many lost. Well, when I came here I wanted 
to know what kind of a job I'd got into. 
I've read everything I could find and I 
know now what we are up against. We're 
not fighting the Huns, we're fighting Hell, 
and if we chaps don't know our business 
the devils will crucify us as they did the 
Canadian soldiers and the nuns in Belgium. 
Lots of fellows here are beginning to under- 
stand that too and that's why they are put- 
ting their hearts into the work. But if you 
are going to write up these camps tell the 
Government, or the Y, or the folks at home, 
to send us more war books, books full of the 
real stuff ; we eat 'em up. The high society 
novels they send are punk for men in camp." 
Comparatively few of the men, however, 
have sensed the seriousness of their job from 
books. Nor did it come to many of them 
from the formal drills, the setting-up exercises 
or the acquisition of military terms and habits. 
The reality, the grim but thrilling reality, of 
their business came from the bayonet. Men 
can stand at attention without paying atten- 
tion, they can form columns of fours auto- 
matically, they can salute as a matter of 
easily acquired habit, they can learn the 
bugle calls by subconscious absorption. But 
no man can wield the bayonet without vis- 



42 THE MIEACLE OF DEMOCEAOY 

ualizing death. The first and chief duty of 
the bayonet instructor is to make men vis- 
ualize death — their own or their foe's. " You 
must get him before he gets you ; it's him or 
you, him or you, him or you." Then the 
ghastly seriousness of the business comes 
over the recruit ; the dreadful alternative 
flashes along every nerve and commands the 
muscles of the eyes, the legs and the arms 
as they have never been commanded before. 
It searches his soul and marks him as a 
coward or a man ; it puts deep lines on his 
face and galvanizes his will ; it changes him 
almost instantaneously from a civilian to a 
soldier. Discipline is comparatively easy for 
the officers after the men have felt the mean- 
ing of cold steel. 

When the soldier is once made discipline 
is simple. One of the most astounding 
things about the cantonments is the ease 
with which the heterogeneous mob has 
setded down into orderly, obedient and 
cheerful military units. Infractions of mili- 
tary or civil law have been less in quantity 
among the National Army men than in- 
fractions of civil law alone among an equal 
number of men in civil life. Major-General 
J. Franklin Bell has made a clear-cut state- 
ment about Camp Upton which is almost 



THE MIRACLE OP DEMOCRACY 43 

incredible but which is indubitably true : 
** We have a democratic army. We have an 
army where no man shirks, but every one 
does his utmost to help. Do you know that 
we have had the troops at Camp Upton — 
there are 30,000 of them — for two months 
and we have not had a single court-martial. 
We have had no court-martial because no- 
body has done wrong. Let me modify that, 
nobody has done wrong intentionally. We 
are all learning — beginners as it were, but 
all of us are doing our best." 

Colonel M. B. Stewart, the Chief-of-Stafif 
at Camp Devens, could not go as far as 
General Bell but he was positively enthusi- 
astic about conditions in his cantonment; 
** The temper and spirit of the men could not 
be better ; the situation here is excellent in 
every respect ; there is not an officer who 
is not highly gratified by the results so far 
obtained," he told me. But I wanted the 
opinion of some one who was actually com- 
manding. I chose Colonel A. S. Conklin, of 
the 303d Field Artillery, a Regular Army 
man who knows what an army means and 
what it means to make an army. He glowed 
with pleasure as he talked about his men. 
" They are simply wonderful ; fine, clean, 
sturdy fellows from Maine, New Hampshire, 



44 THE MIRACLE OF DEMOCRACY 

Vermont and other parts of New England. 
They understand why they are here and are 
putting the best of body, mind and heart 
into their work. There is no surliness, no 
reluctance ; indeed, the very opposite ; when 
an officer has to correct them they actually 
thank him and say, * It won't occur again, 
sir.' It is going to be comparatively easy to 
make first-class soldiers of men with such a 
spirit." But I think General Kennedy, com- 
manding at Camp Dix, was the most enthusi- 
astic officer I saw concerning the drafted 
men. He confessed that he could not get 
over his sense of amazement that his division 
was settling down to its work with such 
unreproachable spirit. One could see satis- 
faction and pride in his face and feel it in the 
timbre of his voice. And yet Camp Dix is 
probably the most difficult of all our units, 
with an unusual amount of unlikely and re- 
calcitrant material drawn from the foreign 
sections of industrial communities. Officers 
of various grades and branches of the service 
in Camp Gordon gave me exactly the same 
impression about conditions in their canton- 
ment. 

" Barbed wire twenty feet high and ten 
feet deep to keep the men from deserting ! " 
Never was a prediction wider of the mark ; 



THE MIRACLE OF DEMOCRACY 45 

never was a fear more completely wiped out. 
And yet not one of those hundreds of thou- 
sands of men went into a cantonment on his 
own initiative ; Uncle Sam stretched out his 
hand, tore them up by the roots from their 
familiar and well-loved environment, dropped 
them into an ugly and comfortless place, 
abrogated the civil liberties which they had 
been brought up to look upon as their in- 
alienable rights, put them to work at rough, 
unaccustomed and monotonous tasks and 
jield before their eyes, as the culmination of 
it all, pain, gas suffocation, mutilation and 
death in a foreign land at the hands of a 
brutalized foe. And yet, — this is the miracle 
of democracy — the cantonments are probably 
the most contented and cheerful spots in 
America, where laughter, cheers and songs 
ripple or ring through the air a hundred 
times a day. 

What wrought the miracle ? Many things. 
First and foremost I put the solicitude of the 
authorities for the welfare of the men. Prob- 
ably forty per cent, of those drafted had not 
been the objects of care since infancy. But no 
sooner did they arrive in camp than all kinds 
of mysteriously inquisitive officers began 
to show a persistent interest in them. Were 
they clean? Some were not. Some had 



46 THE MIRACLE OF DEMOCRACY 

never been bathed in their lives, or at least 
since babyhood. A medical officer at Camp 
Dix told me of one recruit who was so abso- 
lutely filthy that no one would touch him ; 
the hair on his body had grown back into his 
skin ; he was alive with vermin. They had 
to put him on the ground and scour him with 
brooms and soft soap. Following the clean- 
liness inquisitors came the uniformed dentists 
who examined every tooth, extracting some, 
filling others and issuing peremptory com- 
mands about tooth-brushes. Then another 
uniformed under-study of Providence insisted 
upon knowing the condition of the man's 
feet, showing an incomprehensible concern 
for ingrowing toe nails. Was not all this 
enough ? No, it was only the beginning. 
The recruit could not drink water unless it had 
been analyzed, he could not eat meals which 
had not been tested first by scrupulous of- 
ficial palates, he could not sleep in his bunk 
unless it were certified to as being correctly 
made, he could not buy anything at the Post 
Exchange except what had been allowed on 
sale as pure, he could not even march or 
drill with his mouth open for fear of germs. 
So the men began to realize their value, they 
were worth Uncle Sam's most constant scien- 
tific attention. Instead of irritating the men 



THE MIEACLE OF DEMOCEACY 47 

it gave them a new sense of self-esteem. 
Possibly they wondered why they had not 
been worthy of as much solicitude while they 
were mere citizens, but at any rate they were 
now aware that they were valuable assets. 
The flattery pleased them even though they 
seemed to chafe under its application. 

Naturally and logically there followed the 
buoyancy of abounding health. The cleanli- 
ness, the simple but wholesome fare, the 
regularity of exercise, the open air, brought 
something absolutely new to a majority of 
the men — they felt the surge of a rich vitality 
in their veins. Thousands and thousands 
who had only subsisted hitherto began really 
to live. They had come from the gloomy 
canyons of our big cities, they had been 
torn from the cubbyholes of industrial offices, 
they had left forever the lung-clogging lint 
of the mill, they had jumped the counter and 
bade good-bye to the effeminacy of the de- 
partment store ; yes, I feel certain that a 
majority of the men in the cantonments had 
been liberated from haunts or occupations 
which sapped their health and within a month 
had felt themselves to be reborn. 

There will doubtless be many National 
Guard officers who will receive my next 
statement with incredulity. I believe the in- 



48 THE MIRACLE OF DEMOCRACY 

fluence of the Reserve officers has been a 
most potent factor in the rapid moulding of 
the drafted men. In the National Guard 
camps the Reserve officers did not take their 
places with ease. Plattsburg and Madison 
had not given them experience in handling 
men who had just come back from Border 
service and many of the Non-Coms were 
more proficient than the wearers of brand 
new uniforms. But in the National Army 
cantonments the Reserve officers and the 
drafted men were beginning together and 
each knew it. There was mutual tolerance ; 
when the officer muddled his commands and 
tangled his men in a hopeless formation, it 
was received with humor rather than scorn ; 
hauteur slipped out of the budding officer's 
bearing. The Regular Army officers in the 
cantonments spoke much more confidently 
of the Plattsburg probationer than did the 
National Guard officers in the camps. Such 
a psychological situation is possible only in 
a democracy. And the Reserve officers are 
keenly anxious to grow just a little faster 
than their men ; they have a passion for 
leadership which springs from a genuinely 
sacrificial motive. They want their units to 
overtake the National Guard and stand 
abreast of the Regular Army as quickly as 



THE MIEACLE OF DEMOCEACY 49 

possible, that when they lead their men into 
action no one will be able to make any in- 
vidious distinctions between the types of 
troops which face the common foe. 

Still, not all of these military considerations 
combined could have achieved the happy re- 
sults so noticeable in the National Army ; 
something more, something different, was 
needed. Enforced cleanliness, an accession 
of health, abundance of wholesome food and 
a consciousness of duty faithfully performed 
cannot assuage the pangs of homesickness 
or compensate for the involuntary break in 
lifelong habits. There was a chasm to be 
bridged. Fortunately democracy is the real 
Pontifex Maximus. The people of America 
said : ** These boys are ours ; we give them 
to the great crusade of our own free-will ; 
we must do everything conceivable and pos- 
sible to make them feel that the uniform has 
not lifted them out of the normal life of the 
nation." So the people immediately set 
about to normalize the environment of the 
soldiers and thus head off any drift toward 
militarism. They fraternized with the men 
wherever khaki was seen ; they opened their 
homes on Sundays to total strangers as if 
the visitors were their own kith and kin ; 
they hung out service flags and were as 



50 THE MIRACLE OF DEMOCEACY 

proud of the star which symbolized the 
drafted man as of the one which represented 
the Regular Army officer. 

This response of the people produced im- 
mediate results. Officers of the Federal 
Service found state and city officials ready 
to cooperate in eliminating the grosser temp- 
tations from the communities adjacent to the 
camps. Haunts of vice which had flourished 
under local political protection for decades 
were effectually closed. Except through the 
efforts of some degenerate boot-leggers and 
the mistaken generosity of occasional foolish 
friends, liquor was made inaccessible to the 
soldiers. Clubs, lodges, chapters of fraternal 
organizations and a multitude of benevolent 
societies held open house for officers and en- 
listed men. Churches suspended their stereo- 
typed activities and concentrated upon pro- 
viding entertainment, comfort and inspiration 
for the army. Everywhere I have found 
nothing but respect and affection ; the camps 
are family affairs upon a national scale. If 
the Red Cross asked for one hundred million 
dollars the people insisted upon making it 
one hundred and twenty-five millions. If 
the Young Men's Christian Association 
needed thirty-five million dollars the people 
poured out more than fifty millions, and said, 



THE MIRACLE OF DEMOCRACY 51 

" Come again." Every fund projected for 
the benefit of the army is oversubscribed. 
The reflex of this upon the men in the camps 
is incalculable. It is not a cold storage Con- 
gress disgorging money reluctantly under 
executive pressure, but a nation-wide offer- 
ing of affection — it is largesse de luxe. The 
spirit of it thrills back through the canton- 
ments and the men say in their hearts, " We 
will be worthy.'* That is what makes an 
army, an instantaneous and an invincible 
army, in a land where all the traditions of 
thought and action have hitherto been set 
against militarism. 

While a vast amount of this national serv- 
ice for the national army has been spon- 
taneous and undirected, it is only natural 
that the larger part of it should be organized 
in order to function most effectively. Hence 
the War Department's Commission on Train- 
ing Camp Activities, Mr. Raymond B. Fos- 
dick, Chairman. The work of the Commis- 
sion is to coordinate every available force in 
American life for the physical, mental and 
moral benefit of the soldier-body. It aims 
to fill every spare minute of camp life with 
occupations which meet the appetites of men 
accustomed to free, civil life ; to eliminate or 
reduce to a minimum the evils which have 



52 THE MIRACLE OF DEMOCRACY 

always hovered like vampires around mili- 
tary establishments ; and finally, by a feder- 
ated pressure of healthy influences, to 
strengthen and increase the moral health of 
the hundreds of thousands of men whom 
the nation has called to specialized citizen 
service. 

Undoubtedly many parents, wives, sisters 
and friends of the men have been seriously 
disturbed by the wild statements concerning 
immorality on the part of the soldiers. For 
six weeks I have made close investigation of 
such charges and without the slightest hesi- 
tation I brand them as infernal lies. Here 
and there, now and then, a soldier trans- 
gresses ; any one would be a fool and an 
ignoramus to believe otherwise. But let the 
reader think out the situation. A camp of 
foity thousand men between the ages of 
twenty-one and thirty-one implies the most 
virile section of a city of more than three 
hundred thousand inhabitants. But no camp 
produces in a month a fraction of the im- 
morality practiced in such a city in a week. 
Facilities, opportunities and temptations, 
open to civilians all the while in a large civil 
population, are not presented to the soldiers. 
Only the most hardened and desperately in- 
sistent can find the few and well-hidden run- 



THE MIEACLE OP DEMOCRACY 53 

ways of vice. The bulk of the men's time is 
preempted by rigid military duties ; the larger 
part of the balance of their time is filled by 
occupations of the most wholesome nature 
provided within the camp by the various or- 
ganizations working together under Mr. Fos- 
dick's Commission. Occasionally the men 
go to the near-by communities and there the 
vigilance of the Government has practically 
driven away all commercialized vice, and has 
made it next to impossible for a soldier to 
obtain a drink of liquor. The communities 
near the camps are the most vice-free and 
orderly places I know in America or in any 
other land. To assert that our American 
moral sanctities are being violated wholesale 
by the soldiers is a vile insult to American 
womanhood and a form of treason toward 
the Government, and every such accuser 
should be tried instantly as a public enemy. 

I saw Mr. Fosdick on the subject in his 
Washington office. He is one of the calmest 
and keenest men I have ever met, yet he is 
vibrating with a splendid moral enthusiasm. 
Here is what he said : 

** The War Department has three lines of 
defense against the evils traditionally associ- 
ated with armies and training camps. The 
first line consists of the positive, recreational 



54 THE MIEACLE OF DEMOCEACY 

activities designed to take the place of the 
influences we are trying to eliminate. 

" I remember standing in the street of 
Columbus, N. M., shortly after Villa dev- 
astated the village. Five thousand troops 
were encamped near by. There was nothing 
whatever in town to interest the men in their 
hours of leisure — no moving picture shows, 
no reading rooms, no places to read and 
smoke, no homes in which they would be 
welcome, not even a place to sit down. In 
fact, there was nothing at all in town except 
a few dirty saloons, and a red light district. 
That these places were liberally patronized 
was due to the fact that there was nothing to 
compete with them. 

** It is not going to do any good merely to 
set up verboten signs along the road. Mili- 
tary regulations against these evils can be 
made ad infinitum, but nothing will be ac- 
complished unless we can positively create 
wholesome, red-blooded sources of recreation 
and entertainment for our troops during their 
leisure hours. Otherwise, we are not even 
going to make a dent in the twin problem of 
alcohol and prostitution. 

** Obviously, therefore, the Commission on 
Training Camp Activities is more interested 
in its positive recreational program, both 



THE MIEACLE OF DEMOCRACY 55 

within and without the camps, than it is in 
anything else. This is our first hne of de- 
fense. 

" Our second line of defense, in case our 
first fails, lies in the police measures which 
we are taking to surround the men with a 
healthy environment. The powers conferred 
upon the War Department by Sections 12 
and 13 of the Military Draft Law have been 
of great assistance in curbing the evils ; and 
the machinery of the Department of Justice, 
of the Intelligence Department of the Army, 
and of many private organizations, such as 
the American Social Hygiene Association, 
the Committee of Fourteen of New York, 
and the Committee of Fifteen of Chicago, 
have been enlisted in the fight. Through its 
own agents in the field, the Commission is 
keeping in constant touch with the situation 
surrounding every military camp in the 
United States. 

" As concrete examples of what has been 
accomplished may be mentioned the closing 
of red light districts in the following cities : 
Deming, N. M., El Paso, Waco, San Antonio, 
Fort Worth, and Houston, Texas ; Hatties- 
burg, Miss. ; Spartanburg, S. C. ; Norfolk 
and Petersburg, Va. ; Jacksonville, Fla. ; 
Alexandria, La. ; Savannah, Ga. ; Charleston, 



56 THE MIRACLE OF DEMOCRACY 

Columbia and Greenville, S. C. ; Douglas, 
Ariz. ; Louisville, Ky. ; and Montgomery, 
Ala. New Orleans has passed an ordinance 
which will wipe out its red light district on 
or about November 15th. Many cities in 
which no red light districts were formally 
tolerated have, at the instance of the Com- 
mission, abolished their open houses of 
prostitution. 

" The third line of defense, in case the first 
two fail, as far as disease is concerned, lies in 
the very excellent plans for prophylactic work 
laid out by the Surgeon General's Depart- 
ment. Not only have we an inescapable 
responsibility to the families in the com- 
munities from which our young men are 
selected, in keeping their environment clean, 
but from the standpoint of our duty and 
determination to create an efficient army we 
are bound as a military necessity to do 
everything in our power to promote the 
health and conserve the vitality of the men 
in the training camps. This war is going to 
be won on the basis of man power, and we 
cannot afford to lose a single soldier through 
any cause with which medical science can 
successfully grapple. 

•'These, then, are the three lines of defense 
which the Government is setting up to protect 



THE MIEACLE OF DEMOCEACY 57 

the character and efficiency of its troops. In 
so far as it is humanly possible to accomplish 
it, we are determined that our young men 
shall come back from this war with no scars 
except those won in honorable conflict." 

As a result of visits to many camps, search- 
ing investigations in the near-by communities, 
conversations with scores of officers and hun- 
dreds of enlisted men, and a careful question- 
ing of various civilians who know the military 
situation intimately, I believe that Uncle Sam 
is going to send back to their families and 
communities hundreds of thousands and pos- 
sibly millions of men, infinitely better qualified 
physically, mentally and morally for the duties 
of citizenship in a democracy than they were 
when called to the colors. 



Ill 



Democratizing the Army to 
Save Democracy 



Ill 



DEMOCRATIZING THE ARMY TO 
SAVE DEMOCRACY 

ALL my preconceptions went by the 
board when I settled down for a 
while with my old regiment, the 
Thirteenth Pennsylvania Infantry, at Camp 
Hancock, Augusta, Georgia. I had known 
the Thirteenth intimately, from ten years of 
service as chaplain. When I laid down my 
commission about four years ago, it was a 
typical National Guard regiment, well of- 
ficered, proud of its traditions, but always 
somewhat ragged about the edges. Our an- 
nual encampments were jolly afiEairs, streaked 
with conviviality (not to any excess, as Na- 
tional Guard units then went), and the serious 
side of soldiering was difficult to sustain. 
The commissioned officers were wholesome 
fellows, but civil occupations for fifty weeks 
of the year precluded the possibility of focus- 
ing much attention upon their men. 

It so happened that I was with the regi- 
ment on October 17 of this year, when the 
higher command moved about seventeen 
61 



62 DEMOCEATIZING THE AEMY 

hundred men with their subalterns over to 
another regiment. The transfer was a heart- 
breaking affair — a mutilation which left the 
remaining officers stunned. One major con- 
fessed that he had to go to his quarters and 
blubber. I met the captain of the machine 
gun company and asked him to take me 
through his company street, as such a regi- 
mental unit had been unknown in my day. 
At first he demurred, then reconsidered. *' I 
might as well go down there now ; I've got 
to do it some time." The mess hall was 
there and the equipment tents and the store- 
house. Beyond those only four tents stood 
in the street. Then tears came into the 
captain's eyes and a lump in his throat. 
" Only twelve men left out of the com- 
pany ! *' he gulped. " Oh ! isn't it awful, 
after the work I've put into those men for 
fifteen months 1 " 

Such is the new spirit of the army. The 
officers are brooding over their men like a 
hen over her fluffy chicks. They know each 
man intimately, his eccentricities and idio- 
syncrasies ; they guard him against his weak- 
nesses and encourage his virtues ; they are as 
solicitous about a blister on his foot or a cav- 
ity in a tooth as they used to be about the 
rating of the spring inspection of the entire 



TO SAVE DEMOCEACY 63 

company in the days of old. The commis- 
sioned officers and even the battalion com- 
mander eat from the same mess as their men. 
All are bound together by vital ties, genuinely 
human affinities, and the result is a miracle 
in morale. That is the great outstanding 
feature of the new armies ; if you have had 
any experience of military life, you feel it the 
moment you enter the training camp. 

While writing about the old Thirteenth 
Regiment I may as well make another start- 
ling statement. Although at war strength, 
there has not been a new case of venereal 
disease discovered in the six weeks they have 
been at Camp Flancock. The statement 
seemed incredible, so I went to the divisional 
surgeon. Colonel W. E. Keller, and verified 
it with my own eyes on the daily health re- 
ports at headquarters. Such a thing is al- 
most beyond belief. The Judge Advocate 
also told me that in six weeks there had been 
only four cases of " drunk and disorderly " in 
the entire division of 27,000 men. Naturally 
I wanted to know what lay behind this almost 
immaculate condition. 

The little city of Augusta is only four miles 
from the camp, and I determined to make an 
investigation. A newspaper man, writing 
for a syndicate of papers in a Northern city, 



64 DEMOCEATIZING THE ARMY 

helped me considerably. "This is a Sunday- 
school outfit with a vengeance," he said. 
*' Where can you get a drink? Why, old 
man, you will have to go back home for it ! 
I've been here six weeks, and I don't know 
where you could get a * pony ' to save your 
life. There was a man here last week who 
had a bottle in his room, but he's gone now. 
They tell me that if you make friends with 
exactly the right native, and he's dead sure 
you're not a plain-clothes man, he might get 
a bottle of rye for yoi. , but it would cost 
from six to ten bucks and be damned poor 
stuff at that! And women? Why, there 
isn't a house in town, and I doubt whether 
there is a professional in the region. The 
local authorities have cooperated with the 
Fosdick Commission and cleaned the place 
up as I never saw a place cleaned up before. 
I don't mean there's absolutely nothing going 
on, of course. Soldiers sometimes find what 
they are looking for, but it is clandestine and 
occasional. There is no commercialized 
'jice." Further inquiry about town, interro- 
gations of hack-drivers and likely loafers, and 
a more careful questioning of the military 
police confirmed the correspondent's state- 
ment. 

I doubt whether any city near a large mill- 



TO SAVE DEMOCRACY 65 

tary establishment was ever as clean as 
Augusta. I found similar conditions in 
Spartanburg, South Carolina, but that is a 
much smaller place, and therefore more easily 
handled. I am now convinced that some- 
thing more than the climate determined the 
choice of those Southern States as the sites 
for the majority of our camps and canton- 
ments. Where liquor is absolutely banished 
from a region, the moral problems of the 
military commanders are reduced almost to 
the minimum. And I write the following de- 
liberately about Camp Hancock: That I 
would rather intrust the moral character of 
my boy to that camp than to any college or 
university I know. This does not cast any 
unusually dark shadow upon the educational 
institutions of the country, but they have 
never possessed the absolute power to con- 
trol their environment that is now held by 
the War Department. And it does not mean 
that Camp Hancock is conspicuously better 
than the other Southern camps. It simply 
means that I had unusual facilities for discov- 
ering everything I wanted to know in and 
about Camp Hancock, through personal con- 
nections all the way down from the divisional 
headquarters to the enlisted men in the com- 
pany street. 



66 DEMOCRATIZING THE ARMY 

Soldiers are supposed to be inveterate and 
irredeemable grumblers. But if you want to 
see a group of men without grouchiness go 
to Camp Hancock. Quite naturally, the men 
of the National Guard camps are more cheer- 
ful than drafted men ; they enlisted from in- 
clination or patriotism, after counting the 
cost. But the cheerfulness is not all native ; 
it is largely the consequence of satisfactory 
conditions. A sandy soil gives clean, dry 
streets and roads ; even the enlisted men 
have electric light in their tents ; the Post Ex- 
change sells them all the little luxuries of life 
at a reasonable price ; the food is good and 
plentiful, as I found by messing with the 
privates ; play is liberally interspersed with 
work ; the officers show a spirit of comradery ; 
health is far above normal ; and the great 
adventure looms up as a real experience of 
the soul. 

The last item above I use after careful re- 
flection. When the majority of the National 
Guard enlisted, they knew the issues. But 
no chances are taken. In one of the vast 
Chautauqua tents of the Young Men's Chris- 
tian Association I sat on the back row and 
listened to a lecture by Frank Dixon, of New 
York, on " The Causes of the War.'* Three 
thousand men in khaki also listened and ap- 



TO SAVE DEMOCRACY 67 

plauded. The speaker told about little Bel- 
gium, the men of Louvain and Antwerp, and 
how they fought and died for the sanctity of 
international law ; he pictured the raped 
women and the orphaned children and the 
desolated homes; he described the ruined 
churches and demolished universities and 
razed libraries ; he stated the law of vicarious 
suffering — how those splendid heroes had 
borne all and given all to save us from the 
barbarities of a false principle of self-expres- 
sion known as Kuliur ; he sketched how 
England had obeyed the rule of honor when 
self-interest told her to stand aside ; he la- 
mented our early dimness of vision concern- 
ing the issues involved, and our slow enlight- 
enment and ultimate awakening ; and he fin- 
ished by proving that everything worth liv- 
ing for, worth fighting for, worth dying for, 
was at stake. In conclusion he told the men 
that their courage, their devotion, their disci- 
pline, their toll of casualties, were necessary, 
in the last ditch, to save civilization and 
Christianity from falling forever under the 
blighting curse of a triumphantly brutal pa- 
ganism. When the men left the tent, their 
shoulders were squarer and their jaws firmer 
and their eyes brighter — -they were crusaders, 
and the pride of their consecration was clear. 



68 DEMOCRATIZING THE ARMY 

Imagine two square miles of teeming man- 
hood, firmly organized, and yet bearing every 
evidence of care-free liberty. Nothing in the 
camp is left to chance, and yet nowhere and 
at no time do you feel the taint of militarism. 
Here is a platoon — as large as a pre-war 
company — ^just finishing an extended-order 
drill. It has been hard, grinding work under 
a peremptory-voiced platoon commander. 
Suddenly the men come to attention in 
close formation. An athletic director ap- 
pears, takes charge from a platform, and 
gives them fifteen minutes of calisthenics. 
Then — and you can hardly believe your eyes 
— the platoon begins to play leapfrog. This 
goes on for a few moments, and a couple 
of medicine balls appear and for ten min- 
utes more these are hurled from man to man 
with lightning rapidity. Immediately follow- 
ing there is a game very much like drop-the- 
handkerchief, in which the participants chase 
about to find the vacant place. The air is 
full of laughter, the soldiers are romping 
children, the drill monotony is forgotten, 
and when it is over the men rush to their 
shower-baths and then sit down to mess 
with the appetites of tigers. Play is organ- 
ized in all the military establishments. More 
than thirty games have been invented, suit- 



TO SAVE DEMOCRACY 69 

able for company, platoon, or squad partici- 
pation. 

In Camp Hancock, Walter Camp, Jr., of 
Yale, is the divisional director, and his quar- 
ters are with the commanding general's staff. 
I talked with him about his work. He has 
organized the division with brigade, battal- 
ion, regimental, and company directors. Mr. 
Camp's enthusiasm is sublime. " These rec- 
reational interludes," he said, "are getting 
the men into a volitional condition in which 
they will respond quickly to almost any 
moral ideal. We are working in closest 
harmony with the officers, on the one hand, 
and the Y. M. C. A. physical directors, on 
the other. We are humanizing soldiering. 
One regimental commander said to me yes- 
terday, after a series of company games : 
' That's the greatest thing I ever saw in the 
army. No man can have a grouch after 
going through those games.' We are laying 
great stress also upon competitive athletics 
— baseball, football, basket-ball, and boxing, 
by companies, regiments, and brigades." 

I happened to be having luncheon with 
Commanding General Price and his staff 
when the divisional adjutant gave out a no- 
tice : " The General expects every member of 
his staff to report at 5 P. M. for calisthenics." 



70 DEMOCEATIZING THE AEMY 

Such a sight was something not to be missed, 
and I reported also. About thirty men lined 
up under command of Walter Camp. Now 
men who are as near the top of the service 
as the divisional staff are not youngsters, and 
many of them are by no means slim. For 
nearly half an hour they were put through 
their paces — arm and leg and neck exercises, 
abdominal and back exercises, lung and liver 
exercises ; they puffed and panted and 
grunted and groaned, but they went on to 
the end, even the baldest and the fattest of 
them. Then they chose sides and played the 
most riotous game of baseball I have ever 
seen ; and, as I had been chosen umpire, there 
was nothing that escaped me. Military titles 
were dropped entirely, one of the higher kind 
even calling a ranking ofBcer a *' lobster " ; 
they united vociferously in a demand to kill 
the umpire, and far be it from me to tell either 
the score or the number of errors 1 They 
were just boys again, with every bit of their 
healthy human nature unleashed. Those are 
the men who are making our new armies, 
who will lead them onto the battle-fields of 
Europe, who will watch and ward them day 
and night unt^l they return the men to their 
communities and families. It is all so Ameri- 
can, so human — so utterly different from the 



TO SAVE DEMOCRACY 71 

horrible Frankenstein monster which the 
pacifists describe as " the devilish, dehuman- 
izing military machine which crushes indi- 
viduality and kills all natural instincts." 

One evening I was sitting under the fly of 
Brigadier-General Stillwell's tent talking 
about the old and the new days of the army. 
I had told him of all the plans unfolded to 
me in the War Department by Mr. Raymond 
B. Fosdick for training-camp Activities. The 
General is a man of few words but of much 
thought, an ofhcer always loved by the men 
who have served with and under him. Sud- 
denly he turned, and, using the title that I 
bore for ten years on his staff, said : " Cap- 
tain, Uncle Sam seems to be making a Na- 
tional University as well as a National Army." 
That is almost literally true. There are 
academic subjects taught in the class-rooms 
of our universities which will not be provided 
for the soldiers, but if education means " to 
educe " — to draw out qualities of the mind, 
heart, and body by legitimate exercise — then 
the hundreds of thousands of men in our Na- 
tional armies will receive an education such 
as not one in a hundred would have obtained 
in civil life. 

Apparently the Commission on Training 
Camp Activities has thought of everything 



72 DEMOCRATIZING THE ARMY 

and planned for everything. Some of the 
features are not yet in effect, but enough is 
in operation to prove that every man in camp 
and cantonment will be reached ultimately 
by many influences which make for the type 
of manhood a democracy demands. There 
are lectures, plays, movies, and entertain- 
ments every single night in Camp Hancock. 
Over a thousand men are studying French 
under teachers who are instructed by a pro- 
fessor of modern languages from the Pennsyl- 
vania State University. Classes in higher 
mathematics are being held for the engineers. 
At present the Young Men's Christian As- 
sociation is doing a number of things which 
will be taken over by special units of the Fos- 
dick Commission at a later date. Four thou- 
sand books per week are being circulated 
from the five Young Men's Christian Associa- 
tion centres. Gilbert and Sullivan's opera, 
** The Mikado," given by a full professional 
cast, made a week's stand in the camp, and 
*'The Old Homestead" was billed for the 
immediate future. A thrift campaign resulted 
in $35,000 being sent home in one week by 
the men through the Young Men's Christian 
Association, which sells express company 
checks in each of its buildings. Singing by 
companies is being taught by Professor 



TO SAVE DEMOCEACY 73 

Tebbs, the leader of music in the public 
schools of Dayton, Ohio, 

Trench and Camp is the name of an eight- 
page weekly magazine published by the 
Young Men's Christian Association and dis- 
tributed gratis. It contains a record of all 
the athletic events, the educational activities, 
and the amusement features of the camp, to- 
gether with inspirational articles and news 
items of national and international signifi- 
cance. If a man goes to the dogs intellec- 
tually or to the devil morally in Camp Han- 
cock, he will have to do so deliberately by 
breaking violently out of the environment 
which has been planned and developed for 
his well-being. 

Religious work must be left for future dis- 
cussion. As I have confined my attention in 
this chapter almost exclusively to Camp Han- 
cock, it will be sufficient to say that the chap- 
lains and the Young Men's Christian Associa- 
tion are working together in the closest har- 
mony. Pending the completion of the 
Knights of Columbus building, the facilities 
of the Young Men's Christian Association 
were placed freely at the disposal of the Cath- 
olic workers. Bible classes have been started 
in many companies, and a regular Sunday- 
school, studying the International Lessons, is 



74 DEMOCRATIZING THE ARMY 

held Sunday afternoon in the Young Men's 
Christian Association buildings or tents. 
That religion is neither repressed nor crowded 
out is shown by the fact that a chaplain in 
General Logan's brigade baptized seven men 
from his canteen one morning as they made 
public confession of faith in Christ. 



IV 

The Men Behind the Men Who 
Fight the Huns 



IV 



THE MEN BEHIND THE MEN WHO 
FIGHT THE HUNS 

IT was in 1906 that the real international- 
ism of the Young Men's Christian As- 
sociation dawned upon me. Before that 
time my experience with the Young Men's 
Christian Association had not been inspiring ; 
the representatives I had known were of the 
cuddle-close order, strong on tear-drawing 
prayers and suffused with a melodramatic 
emotionalism. I admit that I had been un- 
fortunate in the samples I had met. I was 
fishing for salmon-trout in Lake Chuzenji, 
in the mountains not far from Nikko, when a 
belated copy of ^^ Japan Gazette^ published 
in Tokyo, fell under my eye. It contained 
the following letter from the Minister of War : 

The Young Men's Christian Association, moved by 
the desire to minister to the welfare and comfort of 
our officers and soldiers at the front, carried on its 
beneficent work throughout the Russo-Japanese War 
of 1904-1905. Beginning at Chinampho early in 
September, 1904, it kept pace with the northward 
progress of the field forces for nearly twenty long 
77 



78 THE MEN BEHIND THE MEN 

months, until March, 1906, establishing its work at 
eleven posts in Manchuria and Korea. At large ex- 
pense of money and labor, and by a great variety of 
means, it filled the leisure of our officers and soldiers, 
far from home, with wholesome recreation. The 
completeness of the equipment and the success of the 
enterprise were universally tested and recognized by 
our troops in the field. I am fully assured that the 
recipients of all this generous service are filled with 
deep and inexpressible gratitude. 

Now, simultaneously with the triumphant return of 
our armies, as I learn of the successful termination of 
your enterprise, I take this opportunity to express my 
heartfelt thanks for your noble services, and at the 
same time to voice my appreciation of the generosity 
of all those who have either by gifts or by personal 
effort supported the work. 

(Signed) M. Terauchi, 

Minister of War. 

Tokyo^ 26th May, sgth Meiji {igo6). 
To YoiCHi Honda, Esq., 

President, the Japanese Young Men's Christian As- 
sociation Union. 

Later I talked it over with Messrs. Fisher, 
Gleason, and Hibbard at the Tokyo Young 
Men's Christian Association, and they gave 
me the following account of the work done 
for the Japanese soldiers. Here is the list : 

1,547,483 sheets of paper used. 26,168 books loaned, 

757,159 envelopes. 18,500 used laundry at Feng- 
1,053,381 postcards. wangcheng. 

101,229 portions of Bible dis- 764 visits to hospitals. 

tributed. 613 religious meetings held. 



WHO FIGHT THE HUNS 



79 



312,033 religious tracts. 

3,385 Testaments. 

877,485 men received letter 
supplies. 

87,940 men received supplies 
like buttons, thread, soap, etc. 

152,213 men used barber's out- 
fit. 



1,752 gramaphone concerts, 
lantern lectures, and other 
entertainments. 

1,566,379 men entered the dif- 
ferent branches. 

At least three-fourths of the 
entire army was reached by 
the Association. 



That may be considered the novitiate of 
the Young Men's Christian Association in 
war work. Before Port Arthur, at Vladivo- 
stok and on the bloody battle-fields of 
Manchuria, the Association gathered the 
experience which forms a broad and well- 
tested foundation for the phenomenal work 
now being accomplished in our train- 
ing camps at home and for our expe- 
ditionary force behind the fighting line in 
France. 

Over against the total of supplies for the 
entire Russo-Japanese War put the list of a 
single shipment — only one of many — for our 
army in France : 



240 cases athletic supplies. 

4,000,000 noteheads and en- 
velopes. 

1,000 gross pens and pen- 
holders. 

27 motor cars and trucks, in- 
cluding Fords, Buicks, Pack- 
ards, Pierce-Arrov\rs, 

500 cots, mattresses, and pil- 
lows. 

30,000 folding-chairs. 



Car-load condensed milk. 
125 talking-machines with 

6,000 records. 
55 tons of sugar. 
5 tons biscuits. 
75 tons of flour. 
20 tons soap. 
2 tons of tea. 
5 tons of coffee. 
5 tons of cocoa. 
4,000 rolls rubber roofing. 



;80 THE MEN BEHIND THE MEN 

75 motion-picture machines. For soda fountains — 2 tons 

50 Delco lighting plants. lemonade powder, 200 gal- 

50 stereopticons and thousands Ions syrups. 

of slides. 300 stoves for heating huts and 

Over 100 assembly tents. dugouts. 

Car-load of jams, jellies, and 2,000 all-wool blankets. 

marmalades. 114,000 Bible-reading calen- 

Car-load of " hot dogs " in dars. 

pound cans. 10,000 song books. 

Several car-loads California 30,000 copies Scripture por- 

fruit — pears, apricots, peach- tions of Psalms, Proverbs, 

es, cherries, etc. and Gospel of John. 

60 tons sweet chocolate in five- 
cent bars. 

But to turn to our army camps at home, 
what kind of men are working" here? In 
asking for volunteers this is how the Young 
Men's Christian Association officially de- 
scribes the type of men needed : 

"This is no call to ninnies and milksops. 
The Young Men's Christian Association needs 
real men, preferably men who have had some 
broad and grueling experience of life ; men 
of education, yes ; but, above that, men ca- 
pable of understanding, sympathy, and an 
infinite deal of hard, exacting work. Men 
who can turn a Ford inside out ; men who 
can play the piano and lead five hundred 
others in singing; men who are trained in 
athletics; men six feet high and three feet 
wide and eighteen inches thick; men who 
understand what Christianity really means ; 
men with humor and leadership who have 
been earning a hundred dollars a week and 



WHO FIGHT THE HUNS 81 

are willing to live on ten dollars a week. In 
other words, MEN." 

And in the camps, cantonments, and other 
training stations the Association has twenty- 
two hundred such men at work. Among 
them are some who have given up large 
incomes, others who have resigned univer- 
sity professorships, several college coaches, 
a number of professional musicians, a sprin- 
kling of ministers of known ability in the 
handling of men, and the balance made up 
of the most successful secretaries from the 
city Associations throughout the country. I 
have seen many of them in action — healthy, 
whole-hearted, patient, and generous men 
who sprang to their task each morning be- 
fore daybreak with a " Hurrah," and went to 
their cots at night, dog-tired, but with a song 
or a joke on their lips. Beside the regular 
secretaries I found many volunteers. For 
instance, at Camp Dix there were sixty-four 
Young Men's Christian Association men at 
work in the Young Men's Christian Associa- 
tion buildings, but only three were on full 
salary, while twenty were entirely on their 
own charges. 

There are more than four hundred Young 
Men's Christian Association buildings in the 
camps, costing between $7,500 and $9,000 



82 THE MEN BEHIND THE MEN 

apiece to erect. The buildings alone have 
eaten up about $3,500,000 of the $5,000,000 
raised last spring. I have seen more than 
forty of those buildings, at various hours of 
the day and in the evenings. They are 
always thronged with men — writing home, 
reading, toasting their feet before the open 
fire, playing games, watching the free movies 
or other entertainments, singing lustily in a 
religious service, or listening eagerly to a 
patriotic speech or to a sex-hygiene address 
by a medical authority. And here I give 
some of the things I found the Young Men's 
Christian Association secretaries doing for 
the soldiers : writing letters for " illiterates " 
to their friends, straightening out business 
difficulties at home for the men who left sud- 
denly, having quiet chats with individuals 
about sex matters, giving out Red Cross 
supplies where the Red Cross agent had not 
yet arrived, supplying the place of chaplain 
in regiments which had no chaplain or when 
he was away, directing the reading or studies 
of individuals or litde groups of men who 
were working for transfer to another branch 
of the service, acting as dramatic director 
and scene-shifter, praying with men who had 
received news of family bereavement, arrang- 
ing preliminaries for Mass to be celebrated 



WHO FIGHT THE HUI^S 83 

by a visiting priest in the Young Men's 
Christian Association hut, refereeing a five- 
round bout with the mits, attending to bank- 
ing facilities in near-by communities for those 
who needed them, reporting to anxious rela- 
tives about their boys in the camp who did 
not write regularly, teaching a man how to 
shave, sending money to a wife to visit her 
husband almost demented by homesickness 
— these, and a hundred other things, over 
and above all the routine work of the hut. 

"You see that man?" a secretary said, 
pointing to a round-faced, fair-haired man 
sitting in a Y building. " I had a pathetic 
but happy experience with him. He is a 
German. He came to my room a few days 
after reaching camp, as woebegone a crea- 
ture as I ever saw. He left Germany to 
escape military service, because he hates 
war with an instinctive and reasoned hatred. 
Then he was drafted. He came to camp in 
a pouring rain, and soon developed an atro- 
cious toothache. For two nights he did not 
sleep. At last he went to the dentist. There 
was a very bad ulcer at the root of one of 
his lower teeth. It was lanced, and the poor 
fellow wandered in here almost out of his 
mind with physical and mental pain. He 
told me his story, ending with a threat of 



84 THE MEN BEHIND THE MEN 

suicide. Among other things, I learned he 
was a skilled automobile mechanic. That 
day, at headquarters' mess, I repeated the 
story, and before nightfall we had the man 
transferred to the Motor Transport Service. 
Now he is contented and positively happy in 
his new work. He spends every hour of his 
spare time in this building." 

A good story is told at the expense and to 
the credit of the Young Men's Christian As- 
sociation secretaries in one of the South 
Carolina cantonments. Among the drafted 
men was a man who seemed not to have 
known enough to claim exemption under the 
dependency clause. Not long after reaching 
camp he received a letter from his wife tell- 
ing him that the children were sick, there 
was no food in the house, and the landlord 
threatened to turn them out unless the rent 
was paid. The news drove him to the verge 
of melancholia. Finally he wrote a letter 
addressed to "Almighty God, Y. M. C. A." 
In it he told the news he had received from 
home, how it made him feel bad and was 
keeping him from being a good soldier, and 
ended by asking for fifty dollars to send 
home. When the Young Men's Christian 
Association secretaries read the letter and 
had made some investigations, they made up 



WHO FIGHT THE HUNS 85 

a purse by personal contributions, amounting 
to thirty dollars. They sent the amount, 
three ten dollar bills, in a sealed envelope to 
the man. He counted the money carefully — 
one, two, three — thirty dollars. But he had 
asked for fifty 1 Nevertheless he sat down 
to acknowledge the providence. He told 
God that he had received thirty dollars, that 
he would send it to his wife immediately, 
that it would do much to help the folks at 
home, and that he could now do his soldier 
work better. Then he added : " But, O God, 
if you send me any more money, don't send 
it through the Y. M. C. A. men — those dirty 
skunks took twenty dollars out of the last lot 
for themselves." 

The Young Men's Christian Association is 
not working exclusively in its huts or tents. 
It seems to be a settled principle that the 
safest and most permanent way to reach the 
men is to organize each company on a kind 
of self-sufficiency basis. So, instead of try- 
ing to centre the Bible teaching in the Y 
building, the secretaries are starting a Bible- 
study class or group in each separate com- 
pany. They are doing the same thing along 
educational and entertainment lines— devel- 
oping the talent within the military unit. 
The value of this is obvious : wherever that 



86 THE MEN BEHIND THE MEN 

company goes — to another camp, on detail 
duty, or to France — it will have tested and 
developed resources within itself, able to 
carry on religious work, continue its educa- 
tional classes, and provide its own entertain- 
ments. Such a method also aids the esprit 
de corps of a company and by interchange 
of talent conduces to a high morale in the 
regiment. 

Mr. Richard Hooker, of the Springfield Re- 
publican^ after a very thorough and searching 
survey of the Young Men's Christian Associ- 
ation activities at Camp Devens, Ayer, Mas- 
sachusetts, said, " If, as Wellington averred, 
the Batde of Waterloo was won on the 
playing fields of Eton, then it may be safely 
said that this war will be won in the Young 
Men's Christian Association buildings." Such 
a verdict is not surprising. I took with me 
to Camp Devens Mr. E. Harold Cluett, one 
of the keen and vigorous young business 
men of America, a member of the firm of 
Cluett, Peabody & Co., and educated at 
Williams College and Oxford. I wanted 
his opinion from the standpoint of a prac- 
tical man who knew organization on a large 
scale. It is no exaggeration to say that he 
was staggered by the vastness and thor- 
oughness of the work as we went from one 



WHO FIGHT THE HUNS 87 

thronged building to another — fourteen in all 
— and then closed the evening with the last 
act of a vaudeville in the Y assembly hall, 
packed with more than three thousand men. 
His verdict was simple and direct : •* This is 
the best example of organization I have ever 
seen. I would never have believed, if I had 
not seen it with my own eyes, that such tre- 
mendously uplifting results could have been 
obtained at such a moderate cost." Then he 
concluded, deliberately : *' It is a miracle in 
manhood-making.' ' 

It was in Camp Devens that I met some of 
the most remarkable instances of the broad 
spirit of the Young Men's Christian Asso- 
ciation. In one of the huts we found a group 
of New Hampshire boys reading eagerly from 
New Testaments which had just been pre- 
sented to them by the Governor of the State, 
while in a room near by the Hebrew secre- 
tary was conducting a meeting for Jewish 
soldiers, and near the door of which a cor- 
poral was reading a Catholic magazine. One 
day the wife of one of the soldiers persuaded 
her husband that he should join the church, 
but she was anxious that it should be the 
Presbyterian Church. It happened that one 
of the Young Men's Christian Association 
secretaries was a Presbyterian minister, and 



88 THE MEl^ BEHIND THE MEN 

he was brought from the distant building to 
which he was attached. But, alas ! he had 
no Session. Now, how could a man be re- 
ceived into the Presbyterian Church without 
" coming before the Session " ? The min- 
ister, however, was not to be balked by a 
mere ecclesiastical canon of a few hundred 
years' standing. He found an officer of a 
Methodist Church, a Baptist deacon, a Con- 
gregational deacon, and an Episcopal vestry- 
man, and these he improvised into a Session. 
The candidate was duly examined as to his 
faith and experience, and there and then en- 
rolled as a member of the Presbyterian church 
of Dobb's Ferry, New York — two hundred 
and fifty miles away. One of the best work- 
ers of the Young Men's Christian Association 
staff in Camp Devens is a Unitarian minister, 
but not even the most rigid sectarian, with a 
long-range scent for heresy, could question 
his personal devotion or discount the value 
of the service he is rendering. These men 
adapt themselves to every conceivable vicis- 
situde of the soldier's life. Part of the mili- 
tary training is in trenches — real trenches, 
replicas of those on the Aisne front and built 
under French instructors. Platoons v/ill stay 
in those trenches for seventy-two hours at a 
stretch, eating and sleeping there, in the rain 



WHO FIGHT THE HUNS 89 

and snow and frost. So the Young- Men's 
Christian Association is doing what it does 
on the British front— excavating a Young 
Men's Christian Association dugout twenty- 
five feet underground, with a fireplace in it ; 
and a secretary will always be there to min- 
ister to the boys when they are doing their 
bit in the trenches. When the Y follows the 
men right to the firing line, shares the 
dangers and hardships of the fighters, pro- 
vides comfort and cheer at any cost, no 
wonder the rank and file come to regard it 
with reverence and affection. The letter Y 
is carved deep in the hearts of millions of 
men the world over. 

Finally, it may be said about the Young 
Men's Christian Association that it is cooper- 
ating in a splendid way with every other 
agency that is at work for the betterment of 
the personnel of the army. The chaplains of 
every shade of faith or form of polity are 
given the free use of its buildings. Indeed, 
it may be said that the Young Men's Chris- 
tian Association is the clearing-house of the 
camp, the rendezvous of all the diverse ele- 
ments of the army, the living, sympathetic 
link between the rigid military regime and 
the dear, old free life of civilian days. If the 
Young Men's Christian Association were ever 



90 THE MEN BEHIND THE MEN 

enswathed in sectarianism and coffined in 
dogma, the organization has certainly had a 
glorious resurrection. It stands to-day a live 
man's organization for living men — virile, 
versatile, flexible, resolute. Whatever is 
worth while doing for men — physical, men- 
tal, social, moral, or spiritual — the Young 
Men's Christian Association is ready to do it, 
overcoming apparently insurmountable ob- 
stacles, smashing its determined way through 
hoary customs and stupid prejudices without 
hesitation, and seizing every opening for hu- 
man and humanizing service with the celerity 
and confidence of the highest opportunism. 
I have seen these things done and have 
marvelled. The War Department, the com- 
manding officers, and the enlisted men have 
found this out, and whenever there is a gap 
to be filled, a chasm to be bridged, or a 
morass to be crossed the man who faces the 
difficulty turns instinctively to the Young 
Men's Christian Association for assistance. 

The Knights of Columbus are working in 
the camps and cantonments, not as a secret 
society, but on precisely the same basis as the 
Young Men's Christian Association. Every 
one I met connected with the Knights of 
Columbus frankly acknowledged his in- 
debtedness to the Young Men's Christian 



WHO FIGHT THE BJIEB 91 

Association and wished to copy every help- 
ful feature of the more experienced society. 
Mr. Cusick, of Camp Gordon, allowed me to 
see the instructions sent to each Knights of 
Columbus secretary. They are broad, gen- 
erous, and strictly humanitarian. Here are 
some sample sentences : ** Arrange for an 
address by some prominent non-Catholic 
man in the community." ** Extend an invi- 
tation to ezjery man in camp to make use of 
our buildings at all times, and make it plain 
that they may call on the secretary for any 
assistance they may wish." ** Innocent games 
are to be encouraged and permitted, but 
gambling of all kinds must be rigidly ex- 
cluded from our buildings." " Cooperate in 
a friendly way with the Young Men's Chris- 
tian Association, make it a point to treat the 
inquiries of non-Catholics with the greatest 
respect." ** Put a sign reading, * Write often 
to Mother ' above the writing-tables." " If 
there is ever a time that a man needs his re- 
ligion, it is during the uncertain time of war, 
and the men may be inclined to forget this 
unless they are told now and again." " Your 
building is not to be a church except at such 
times as religious services are being con- 
ducted there, but it is a place in charge of 
Catholic gentlemen and for the benefit of all 



92 THE MEN BEHIND THE MEN 

men who will conduct themselves as gentle 
men. Any violations of the principles of de- 
cency are not only to be frowned upon, but 
absolutely forbidden." 

With the exception that Mass is held in the 
Knights of Columbus buildings, I could see 
no essential difference between them and the 
Young Men's Christian Association huts. 
Each has ample writing facilities, libraries, 
magazines, phonographs, moving-picture ap- 
paratus, and games, and alike they give the 
same cordial welcome to and place their 
equipment freely at the disposal of all the 
men in camp without regard to race, creed, 
or caste. I talked over the possibilities of 
the work with the Rev. J. A. Horton, Princi- 
pal of Marist College, Atlanta, Georgia, and a 
Knights of Columbus chaplain. He was ex- 
tremely broad in his conception of the work to 
be done, and it never entered into his thought, 
even remotely, that the opportunity for hu- 
man service would be warped by sectarian 
bias. Father Walsh, a Knights of Columbus 
chaplain at Camp Dix, was eager to tell me 
everything about his building and its work. 
He was gleeful over the way in which the 
men made use of its facilities, how they ap- 
preciated the pool table, the entertainments, 
and the lectures. He told with enthusiasm 



WHO FIGHT THE HUNS 93 

of how he was cooperating with the military 
authorities in encouraging boxing because 
the exercise aided the bayonet drills. He 
said they entertained never less than twelve 
hundred men a day. They had Masses every 
morning and twice on Sunday, but made no 
effort to influence non-Catholics to attend 
the stricdy religious services. Father Walsh 
was on the ground all through the period of 
camp construction, and as an appreciation of 
his faithfulness an automobile was presented 
to him by the civilian plumbers for use in his 
work. 

The Hebrew Association has no buildings 
of its own, but uses the Young Men's Chris- 
tian Association huts for any specific work it 
wishes to pursue. It has a paid secretary in 
every camp — a bright, well-educated, and 
earnest young man who takes particular care 
of the Jewish soldiers. The most important 
phase of the Hebrew Association work is the 
manner in which it affiliates its soldiers with 
the Hebrew families and synagogues in the 
communities adjacent to the camps. All of 
these men and institutions cooperate in the 
heartiest manner conceivable with the direct- 
ors of physical training, recreation, and music 
within the camps appointed by the Fosdick 
Commission, with the playground representa- 



94 THE MEN BEHIND THE MEN 

tives and the civil authorities in the surround- 
ing communities, with the regimental chap- 
lains, and with the regular military authorities. 
As the result of visits to several camps and 
cantonments I got the impression that there 
was a veritable conspiracy of positively good 
forces, a kind of confederacy of sanely moral 
agencies, to present to the world, not only a 
victorious fighting machine, but to create an 
order of healthy, clean, intelligent, and full- 
orbed moral manhood such as this country 
would never have had if the degeneracy of 
Germany had not forced us into the war. 



Making Democracy Safe for the 
Soldier 



MAKING DEMOCRACY SAFE FOR 
THE SOLDIER 

THE War-Camp Community Service 
in Atlanta, described in this chapter, 
gives a good idea of what is being 
done in all the camp cities. 

An unexpected rain-storm drove me into a 
corner fruit store for shelter. A man in 
khaki was shaking the water from his uni- 
form very much as a dog shakes itself after 
a plunge. In less than a minute a package 
of cigarettes put us on a friendly footing. 

" Yah," he said, ** the people of Atlanta 
treat us white — gosh, but I was lonesome the 
first week in camp — first time Fd ever been 
away from home over night — never been in 
a town as big as this before — never thought 
that women could be as nice to men they 
didn't know — never heard so much music in 
all my life — nobody tries to stick us — don't 
give a damn for the soldiering part in camp, 
but the other things that go with it are O. K. 
— hope I don't go to France, hope the war 
will be over before we get ready, then I 
97 



98 MAKING DEMOCRACY SAFE 

figure I'll come and live in Atlanta — they're 
some fine people here, sure." 

A man's environment is anything that en- 
grosses his mind or engages his affections. 
The populated areas around our forty or fifty 
camps, cantonments, and training stations 
are the physical environment of more than a 
million of our picked young men ; the men 
and the women with whom they come into 
contact within that area are the actual and 
vital environment. Ideas and ideals are the 
ultimate realities, the forces that make char- 
acter and guide conduct. In handling the 
high-mettled men of a democracy it is not 
possible to corral them in a camp after the 
fashion of an autocracy and beat them into 
military shape. They would not surrender 
the privileges of democracy at home to fight 
for democracy abroad. The men of our new 
armies have the freedom of the towns and 
cities close to their camps, and the influence 
of those communities upon the men is by no 
means the least concern of the War Depart- 
ment. The Commission on Training Camp 
Activities, Mr. Raymond B. Fosdick, Chair- 
man, has asked the Playground and Recre- 
ation Association of America so to organize 
the social life of the communities that it will 
mean a healthy reaction upon the camps. 



FOR THE SOLDIER 99 

To discover what had been done and what 
could be done I went to Adanta, Georgia. 
Camp Gordon is fourteen miles distant from 
the city, Fort McPherson four miles, and the 
Aviation School is upon the campus of the 
Georgia Insdtute of Technology, within the 
city limits. Atlanta is a proud city and con- 
templates itself with a marked degree of sat- 
isfaction. Has it not done several big things 
in a big way within recent years? When 
has Adanta failed to see and to seize an 
opportunity? The questions are answered 
fluently and frankly in the literature of the 
Chamber of Commerce and in the confident 
speech and bearing of the citizens. But I 
was in a skeptical mood ; perhaps the proc- 
lamation of Mayor Asa G. Candler prej- 
udiced me : 

" Atlanta sought and secured the establishment here 
of one of the army cantonments, into which will be 
entered for military training thousands of American 
young men coming from every section of the country 
and from every walk of life. With them it is reason- 
able to suppose that almost an equal number of peo- 
ple will come and temporarily be citizens of Atlanta. 
. . . When we asked for these army camps, we 
did it for two reasons : 

"First, that we might contribute as a community 
toward furnishing to the country men properly pre- 



100 MAKING DEMOCRACY SAFE 

pared to represent us on the great battle-fields of 
Europe to which they are going to be sent. 

" Second, that in doing so we might also benefit in 
every possible way Atlanta and her people." 

Undoubtedly in the majority of minds the 
second consideration was paramount. Other 
communities were moved by a similar mo- 
tive. Wherever a camp was established the 
residents of the adjacent communities began 
to estimate their profits and to plan how it 
•* might benefit in every possible way Adanta 
and her people." Then, behold I Every- 
thing inverted, the foreseen order topsyturvy, 
the grasping fist changed to the open hand 
of giving. What did it? Not a fiat from 
the War Department, for moral resolutions 
do not come by ukase. When tens of thou- 
sands of homesick boys, torn from their fa- 
miliar setting, with eyes eager to serve their 
country in spite of heavy hearts, began to 
pour into the camp and overflow into the 
streets of the city, every decent American 
citizen subordinated personal profit to the in- 
stincts of brotherhood and began to ask, 
*' What can we do for these fellows ? " At- 
lanta set itself to answer that question with a 
combination of intelligence and enthusiasm 
almost beyond praise. Under the best lead- 
ership the city could furnish, Atlanta mobil- 



FOR THE SOLDIER 101 

ized and organized its resources for the bene- 
fit of the soldiers. 

Everything is organized under a Commis- 
sion consisting of twelve representative citi- 
zens, five of whom are ex-Presidents of the 
Chamber of Commerce and one the present 
acting President. The ex officio members 
are the Mayor, the Major-General command- 
ing the Eighty-second Division at Camp 
Gordon, the colonel in charge of the field 
base hospital at Fort McPherson, the District 
Attorney, the United States Internal Revenue 
Collector, and the president of the Atlanta 
Chapter of the Red Cross. Presiding over 
the Commission is Mr. V. H. Kriegshaber, 
one of the most vigorous and successful of 
Atlanta's business men. 

"What is your Commission doing?" I 
asked Mr. Kriegshaber, as we sat in his office. 

His answer was in measured sentences, but 
suffused with enthusiasm : 

" We are organizing and using all the 
helpful and recreational resources of our city 
for the welfare and benefit of the soldiers at 
Camp Gordon and Fort McPherson ; we are 
creating normal relations between the sol- 
diers and the community by establishing 
social intercourse and surrounding them with 
a safe environment ; we are trying to help 



102 MAKING DEMOCEACY SAFE 

Uncle Sam make the soldiers into the most 
efficient military unit the world has ever 
seen." 

** How are you doing it ? " 

"If you will come with me to the meeting 
of the Executive Committee, you will see and 
hear." 

The members of the Committee, which 
meets every Thursday at 1 1 A. M., discussed 
policies and problems in the light ot the past 
week's experience, created new sub-commit- 
tees for special purposes or filled vacancies 
in existing ones, considered ways and means 
of putting into effect suggestions from the 
National Committee on Training Camp Ac- 
tivities, and then formally adopted the fol- 
lowing monthly budget after its approval by 
the Safety Committee : 

Expenses of Atlanta Commission, including secretary, 
stenographer, other ofi&ce help, stationery, rent, 

postage, etc ^450 

Travelling and transportation expenses of employees 

to camp, etc c . . . . 200 

Expenses of free Sunday movies, with organ and other 
concerts at Auditorium, cooperating with Atlanta 

Festival Association 500 

Expenses in connection with colored soldiers' recreation 

and rest rooms 500 

Balance needed by Y. M. C. A 500 

Travellers' Aid Society 200 

National League of Women's Service 250 

Anti-Tuberculosis Association 650 

Total per month $3,250 



FOR THE SOLDIER 103 

This amount is subscribed by Atlanta citi- 
zens for the duration of the war. 

At twelve o'clock we adjourned to another 
room for luncheon and for a round table con- 
ference with the committee chairmen of the 
city and representatives of the various 
branches of non-military activities within the 
camp. Each in turn made a report, men 
from the camp telling what was needed 
during the coming week and the city workers 
stating what material was available for those 
needs. In many ways it was the most re- 
markable meeting I ever attended, marked 
by a unique spirit of cooperation. Mrs. B. M. 
Boykin reported for the Federated Women's 
Clubs of Atlanta — several in number — sketch- 
ing briefly the salient features of their work. 
For example : the women of the city were 
going out to Camp Gordon in the afternoons 
to mend the men's clothing and to teach 
them how to do their own sewing ; the 
Daughters of the American Revolution had 
organized to teach the colored women to knit 
for their own soldiers ; the School of Oratory 
had organized a glee and mandolin club ; 
Mrs. E. S. Jackson promised a huge Christ- 
mas pageant to be given both in the city and 
the camp, etc. 

The Transportation Committee reported 



104 MAKING DEMOCRACY SAFE 

the number of automobiles lent by citizens to 
take convalescent soldiers for a ride in the 
afternoons and to carry volunteer entertainers 
back and forth to the camps. The Entertain- 
ment Committee told of so many concerts, 
shows, readings, impersonations, etc., that I 
could not tabulate them ; a representative of 
the local Drama League said that the needs of 
the camp had revived his society, and they 
had a repertoire of plays which would last 
all winter ; the secretary of the Hebrew 
Association in the camp described how the 
people of Jewish faith in Atlanta had brought 
about a hundred Hebrew soldiers in to a 
dance where they met young ladies of their 
own race, and how it had been arranged that 
Hebrew soldiers should have furlough on 
their sacred days and come into the city to 
live with Jewish families and celebrate their 
religious rites. He spoke generously of the 
splendid manner in which the Young Men's 
Christian Association placed all the facilities 
of its buildings at his disposal. At that point 
the secretary of the Knights of Columbus 
sprang to his feet and added his testimony to 
the fine spirit of the Young Men's Christian 
Association, for, pending the completion of 
his building, he had the free use of all or any 
of the Young Men's Christian Association 



FOE THE SOLDIER 105 

buildings for his Knights of Columbus activ- 
ities among the Catholic soldiers. 

Although I was only a guest, I was so 
moved by this evidence of religious comity 
that I asked permission to tell an incident 
which came to my notice in an English 
paper. At the battle of Messines Ridge a 
Catholic soldier lay dying, blown almost to 
pieces by a bomb. No Catholic chaplain 
happened to be near, and no Protestant 
chaplain was available ; but a Hebrew rabbi, 
acting as chaplain to the Jewish troops, bent 
over the dying Catholic and held the crucifix 
to his lips while he breathed his last. For a 
moment the story was received with reverent 
silence, and then every one in the room 
broke into applause. Some of the by-prod- 
ucts of this war may be worth all the sacrifices 
of men, money, and strength we are making 
so freely. 

Another illustration of the above remark 
may be found in what the next speaker — the 
camp educational director — said. Among 
drafted men in Camp Gordon were large 
numbers of sturdy Southern mountaineers, 
English-speaking but illiterate. In some 
companies the number ran as high as fifteen 
per cent. These were being taught to read 
and write, and rapid progress was reported. 



106 MAKING DEMOCEACY SAFE 

But a few of these men were found who did 
not know why we were at war or the nation 
against which we were fighting. Neither 
did they seem to care ; Uncle Sam wanted 
them to fight, and they didn't mind much 
who it was — EngHsh, French, Germans, or 
Russians. Uncle Sam wanted them, and 
that was enough. A few months of camp 
life will send those men back to their moun- 
tain homes with a vision of possibilities 
which will change the character of all suc- 
ceeding generations. Besides the English 
work the director mentioned that seventy- five 
volunteer teachers were going out from the 
city regularly to conduct classes in French. 

The Camp Director of Singing thanked 
the Committee for the book of songs which 
had been distributed gratuitously to each 
soldier, the cost of publishing the book hav- 
ing been met by paid advertisements. Al- 
though the librarian had nothing to tell of 
the American Library Association, he ac- 
knowledged the receipt of ample quantities 
of good books and recent magazines. The 
Library Association has met the immediate 
demand for reading by an arrangement with 
the Atlanta laundries. The following notice 
sent to every home in the city tells its own 
story : 



FOR THE SOLDIER 107 

TO THE ATLANTA PUBLIC 

The Laundrymen's Association have very kindly 
tendered the free use of their delivery wagons to 
collect any magazines and books that you may care to 
give to the Carnegie Library for use of our Soldier 
Boys at Camp Gordon and Fort McPherson. Every 
home has some books or magazines that can be spared 
for this patriotic purpose. Please "do your bit " and 
hand these to your laundryman. The Carnegie Li- 
brary will see that they are properly delivered to the 
Soldiers. 

Atlanta Commission on Training Camp 
Activities. 

Atlanta has an auditorium which will seat 
sixty-five hundred, and which contains one 
of the best organs in the world. Every Sun- 
day a " continuous performance " is given 
for the soldiers from 2 : 30 till 10 P. M. It is 
absolutely free, and consists of organ recitals, 
movies, popular singing, and entertaining 
features of various kinds— but all refined and 
elevating. 

The Young Men's Christian Association 
secretary reported the multiform work being 
carried on, not only in the buildings, but in 
the companies, and testified to the splendid 
encouragement given by all the officers, from 
the general in command to the most recent 
reserve subaltern. He also commended the 
churches heartily for their cooperation in all 



108 MAKING DEMOCEAOY SAFE 

good work for the soldiers. Mr. Kriegshaber 
assured us that the local city authorities and 
police were working with the Federal au- 
thorities and the representatives of Mr. 
Fosdick's Committee for the control, and, 
finally, for the suppression of vice in and 
around the city. As such measures have to 
be taken with discretion and secrecy, he 
could not go into the subject exhaustively. 
But he told how the Travellers* Aid Society, 
through its representatives at the railway 
stations and on the streets, and the Young 
Women's Christian Association, by means of 
hostess houses and the formation of clubs and 
guilds among the girls and young women of 
the city, were making a marked contribution 
toward the solution of the problem by positive 
and educational methods. 

The men in uniform, as I saw them on the 
streets and in public places, were orderly and 
of exceptionally good behavior. I walked 
about the city for more than two hours after 
nightfall, and, although khaki was in evidence 
everywhere, I never saw or heard a semblance 
of rowdyism. I believe the soldier will almost 
invariably meet the community in the spirit 
in which the community meets him. I was 
assured by the ladies present that not a single 
instance had been reported of a rude act or 



FOR THE SOLDIER 109 

word by a soldier toward the ladies and girls 
who have been interesting themselves in the 
camp. 

The story of Atlanta's relationship to the 
new army, how the city is meeting its obliga- 
tion, more intent upon serving than upon 
the gains of commerce, is merely etched. I 
do not know whether any community near a 
camp or cantonment is doing more or better 
work than Atlanta, but what I saw made me 
proud of the men and women who are ex- 
emplifying democracy at its best. 

Augusta, near Camp Hancock, and Spar- 
tanburg, near Camp Wadsworth, are perhaps 
doing all that the facilities of smaller com- 
munities can offer. Baltimore and Washing- 
ton, near Camp Meade, and Philadelphia, 
which is easily accessible from Camp Dix, 
have more serious problems, caused partly 
by the largeness of the cities and partly by 
the difficulties of handling the liquor situa- 
tion. Perhaps the efforts being made by 
the representatives of the Playground and 
Recreation Association in smaller places near 
Camp Dix — New Egypt, Bordentown, Mount 
Holly, and Wrightstown — will soon over- 
come the temptations of Trenton and Phila- 
delphia by providing sufficient entertainment 
for the men on the very confines of the 



110 MAKING DEMOCRACY SAFE 

cantonment. At any rate, the positive in- 
fluence of the Playground and Recreation 
Association will make a wholesome environ- 
ment near at hand if the men will avail them- 
selves of it ; and this, linked to the vigorous 
activities of the Training Camp Commission 
within the cantonment, will lift thousands of 
men much higher in the scale of a healthy 
mental, moral, and physical manhood. The 
opportunities of such work are so great and 
its satisfactions so splendid that the various 
organizations of a social or humanitarian or 
religious kind are amply justified in with- 
drawing their best and wisest workers from 
the normal communities and concentrating 
them in and around the training camps. 

While the men fight to make the world 
safe for democracy, we must fight to make 
democracy safe for the men. 



VI 

Will America Fail? 



VI 
WILL AMERICA FAIL? 

WRITING from one of the canton- 
ments, a soldier said : *' I wish the 
people at home could get their 
minds on this war business as we have ours 
fixed on it here." Evidently there is too 
much complaint reaching the camps ; the 
folks back home are dwelling unduly upon 
the little deprivations and dislocations caused 
by the absence of their loved ones ; perhaps, 
with a false psychology, they are exaggerat- 
ing the hardships caused by high prices and 
limited commodities to let the soldiers know 
that they too are sacrificing. Democracy is 
a highly sensitive organism, and what is felt 
in one part is quickly experienced through 
the whole body. The drill master can make 
a man into an automaton of autocracy but 
something more is needed to make a cham- 
pion of democracy. Our soldiers now in 
training will be just what the people of 
America expect them to be, will them to be. 
They feed their individual souls on the aspir- 
113 



114 WILL AMEEICA FAIL! 

ations and inspirations and determinations 
of the national soul. That larger life, upon 
which their separate lives depend for exist- 
ence, comes to them in letters through the 
mail, in daily papers and weekly or monthly 
magazines. And, being something spiritual, 
it also finds its way into the camps along 
channels no one can trace. They respond 
to it and embody it, yet all the while not 
knowing what is molding them. The mind 
of the nation reaches the men through the 
military command, the War Department, the 
munition factories ; the soul of the nation 
reaches the men through continued contact 
with the old civil life. Efficiency in the army 
reflects the mental vigor of America but the 
morale of the army will reflect the spiritual 
quality of America. 

The front Ime of battle in this struggle is 
somewhere in France, Flanders and Italy ; 
the field of war stretches back into every 
home, workshop, lodge room, club house and 
church in America. Liberty Loans are im- 
portant because they furnish the government 
with money ; Young Men's Christian Asso- 
ciation and Knights of Columbus and Com- 
munity Recreation campaigns are necessary 
because they guarantee a normal environ- 
ment for the troops during an abnormal 



WILL AMEEICA FAIL? 115 

experience ; Red Cross drives are indispen- 
sable because they bring the Angel of Mercy 
into the hell of conflict; but these laudable 
enterprises have a value even beyond those 
described — they proclaim to a million and a 
half men in uniform that they have the confi- 
dence and backing and affection of the people 
who remain at home. When they know that 
the busy and influential men and women in 
the old home village or city are giving freely 
of their time and strength and wealth on their 
behalf, and that the obscure and the poor also 
are contributing proportionately to the same 
cause, there comes an accession of pride and 
courage to the men in the training camps 
and trenches and out upon the high seas. 
Not enough of our civilian population realize 
the significance of this. 

There is a sense in which this war has not 
yet gripped the generality of people. In al- 
most every community there is a shamefully 
large proportion of men and women whose 
thoughts and habits have remained un- 
changed ; the world cataclysm has made no 
difference to their self-absorbing method of 
living. And they seem to intend that it shall 
make no difference. This has been partly 
due to the failure of the press and the pulpit 
to understand that vicariousness can be upon 



116 WILL AMEEICA FAIL? 

an international scale. During the past three 
years our provincial minds have thought of 
the Belgians as fighting for Belgium, the 
French for France, the British for Britain and 
the Italians for Italy. Slowly, very slowly, 
it is breaking in upon our reluctant minds 
that every man who has been blinded or 
broken or killed in Europe has suffered for 
us. If every American would ask his con- 
science: "When the war has made such a 
tragic difference to Belgium, France, Britain, 
Serbia, Roumania and Italy, while they were 
standing between barbarity and the sanctity 
of my home and the security of my nation, 
is it not time that it began to make some 
difference to me?" then we should see the 
entire nation spring into sacrificial activity. 

Our citizens ought to endeavor to visual- 
ize the difference the war has made to the 
hundreds of thousands of men now wearing 
the American uniform. They have sacrificed 
their financial prospects, many of them be- 
yond recovery ; thousands have left college 
in the midst of their studies, never to return ; 
nearly all have foregone the comforts of 
homes as dear to them as to the rest of us ; 
they must all spend months of drastic train- 
ing in camps or on ships; before them — 
how many we dare not compute — there are 



WILL AMEEICA FAIL? 117 

ghastly wounds and painful deaths upon a 
foreign batde-field, or devilish tortures in 
barbaric prisons ; to all of them there will be 
cold, hunger, thirst, weariness and the sur- 
rounding horrors of war. If service means 
all that and even more to our men-in-arms, 
what right have we, in the peace and security 
of our homes, to refuse to conform our lives 
to the new conditions? 

Neither can any civilian say he has done 
his share while anything more remains that 
he may do. If the men and women of cap- 
ital give one-half of their accumulations in 
order to save the other half, they may con- 
sider that they have gotten off very cheaply ; 
if the business man allots a third of his time 
to war work in his community he is well off 
compared with his neighbor whom the draft 
took ; if it be necessary to go to bed dead 
tired every night, before any one grumbles 
he should picture the man in the trenches 
with no bed at all but the muddy floor of a 
dugout and no covering but his wet, cold 
clothing ; if a woman has to abandon social 
functions to make surgical dressings she 
ought to remember that the fairest and 
noblest women of other lands have been 
slaving in the hospitals at the front for many 
weary months without respite or reward ; if 



118 WILL AMEEICA FAIL? 

the laboring man is called upon to exceed the 
usual hours of work he may thank his stars 
that he still has a chance to work as a free 
man for freedom ; if the industrial economist 
is inclined to carp at narrowed profits he 
should consider that production for the whole 
must overrule profits for the few, because if 
we lose the war we shall have to pay indem- 
nities for all the nations into the coffers of 
Germany — which will eat up all our profits 
for many generations to come ; if we are 
prone to chafe because of a sugarless, or 
meatless, or wheatless menu we bow our 
heads in reverence at the thought of the 
father and mother who will sorrow for the 
son who rests in an unmarked grave across 
the sea. No one understands the spiritual 
and universal significance of this war who 
talks of having done " his share." 

No war in which our nation has ever been 
engaged is like this war. The Revolution 
was a conflict for rights, but they were our 
rights. The Civil War was a struggle to 
preserve this nation as a nation, and it con- 
cerned ourselves almost exclusively. But 
we are fighting now for the future of human- 
ity, for those universal sanctities which mark 
us as higher than the beasts, for the spiritual 
prerequisites of progress and peace — honor, 



WILL AMERICA FAIL? 119 

truth, righteousness and justice. To say 
that we battle for democracy is an under- 
statement, to say that we fight for civilization 
falls below the issue ; we are at war for all 
the slowly and painfully accumulated funda- 
mental virtues and graces which we call 
Christianity. 

If we fail now, and the world comes under 
the domination of that Germany which vio- 
lated every treaty and plighted honor, which 
dragged the villainous Turk down to its own 
viler level, which raped and poisoned and 
mutilated women and children and called its 
preachers and professors to justify the ghastly 
outrages, which made all the perfidies and 
passions and butcheries of the Moguls seem 
almost like the incidents of mere misguided 
virtue : — if that Germany wins the war then 
mankind, which had climbed so nearly to the 
sublime stature of Christ, will fall back to the 
unspeakable wallowings of Calaban. 

These considerations concern us all and at 
all times. They should glow in the letters 
written to the men in camp, they should 
regulate the program of every day's activi- 
ties, they should write the figures in the 
check book when demand is made upon our 
patriotism, they should determine the mood 
in which the appeals of various war-work 



120 WILL AMEBIC A FAIL! 

activities are received. The churches back 
in the home towns and villages ought to 
treat their men in the camps as exemplars of 
the sacrificial spirit of the Master-Lord and 
send messages, letters and tokens of com- 
radeship to them ; public officials should be 
enthusiastic and eager to minimize the temp- 
tations wherever men in uniform are found ; 
every agency for the physical, social, moral 
or spiritual benefit of the soldiers should have 
proud and joyful volunteers in superabun- 
dance to provide whatever is required ; each 
community, large or small, should imme- 
diately organize its resources upon a scien- 
tific basis for the period of the war in order 
instantly to meet emergency calls, and not 
depend upon a haphazard, ill-arranged 
campaign in which many of the most val- 
uable human and financial factors are missed ; 
every man or woman, whether lay or clerical, 
who sees the spiritual issues of the struggle 
and has the gift of clear interpretation, 
should be used in school and church and on 
the public platform to create the high temper 
needed by the nation in such a crisis ; all 
political party distinctions and sectarian dif- 
ferences should be minimized, while together 
and as one men gird themselves to guard 
and establish the everlasting essentials. The 



WILL AMEEICA FAIL? 121 

battles will be lost or won by the soldiers 
and sailors now in training ; the war will be 
lost or won by the ordinary American men 
and women. The last reserve of democracy, 
civilization and Christianity is now on trial. 
Will America fail ? Not if we realize that 
this is the last and most holy of the Crusades ; 
not if we understand that as a nation we have 
one and only one business now — to win the 
war ; not if we feel that our hundreds of 
thousands of fighting men are carrying for- 
ward and completing the work begun on 
Calvary ; not if we plain citizens of to-day 
can foresee that all future generations in all 
lands will look back upon our sacrifices as 
the most glorious contribution to human 
welfare. Will America fail ? Not unless 
America first becomes a vassal of Germany 
on a parity with Turkey, Bulgaria and the 
subsidized elements of the Russian Bolshe- 
viki — a level to which our Pacifists and pro- 
Germans would gladly drag us. So long as 
the spirit of Washington and Lincoln beats 
clearly and strongly in our souls America 
cannot fail. 



Printed in the United States of America 



A Book that Radiates Faith, Hope, and Courage 

FOURTH EDITION 

The Cross at the Front 

FRAGMENTS FROM THE TRENCHES 

By 
CHAPLAIN THOMAS TIPLADY, B.E.F. 

12mo. Cloth. Net $1.00 

^ Shows US the soldier at the front, as the 
author knows and loves him, " not scarlet — 
nor yet white — but just Khaki." 

C " Sincere faith, unflagging courage, thorough man- 
liness — an interesting book by a chaplain greatly 
loved." — Providence Journal, 

C " One of the best of the war books. The author, 
a field chaplain, was in Flanders in the thick of the 
fight for many months. He pictures the real soldier 
at the front — his heroism, his sacrifice, his reverence 
for all sacred things as few writers have been able 
to picture him." — The Pittsburgh Post. 

CL * It is a first-hand account of heroism and self 
sacrifice. Here are stories which none can read dry- 
eyed, but, nevertheless, are contagious of hope and 
honor and courage. Of all the war literature issued in 
the last three years none follows the lines or parallels 
the purpose of THE CROSS AT THE FRONT." 

— The Nashville Banner. 

C *' * Vivid * is too dim a word to express the living 
pictures which this chaplain has seen in France. Some 
of the chapters are among the finest pieces of pathos 
we have read anywhere. Read the book and you will 
be a better man for all your tasks."— CA/ca^o Standard. 

C ** Marked by a vividness which shows it to have 
been written within range or sound of the guns, full 
of that humanness which will cause answering echo in 
the heart of every reader." — Episcopal Recorder^ 



Former Head of Press Bureau Serbian 'Foreign Office 

South-Eastern Europe 

The Main Problem of the Present World Struggle 
By VLADISLAV R. SAVIC 

Introduction by NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER, 
;0f Columbia University 
12mo, cloth, net $1.50 
" A book which makes appeal to every intelligent reader 
who wishes to have the knowledge necessary to form an inde- 
pendent opinion as to the conditions on which durable peace 
shall rest. M. Savic is a native Serb, who, through service 
as correspondent of the English press, has been brought in 
close touch with British public opinion." 

— Pres. Nicholas Murray Butler. 

ARMENIA: A Martyr Nation 

By M. C. GABRIELIAN 
12mo, cloth, net $1.75 
An exceptionally informative history of the Armenian nation 
from its earliest days to recent tragic days. Himself an 
Armenian, the author has brought together the salient features 
in his country's tragic story in able fashion throughout. The 
book is one of extraordinary interest. 

In the Land of Ararat 

A Sketch of the Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Barrows Ussher 

a Martyr of the Turkish Massacre at Van 

By JOHN OTIS BARROWS 

Illustrated. 12mo, cloth, net $1.00 

" In these days of world conflict, the readers who have been 

in the hair-breadth escapes and wonderful experiences of 

Dr. Clarence D. Ussher, cannot but be interested in this story 

of the life of his wife, who crowned a career of remarkable 

usefulness by giving in sacrifice all that was naturally dearest 

to her, in her effort to save from suffering and death the 

families of those who had tried to kill herself and her children." 

—The Chronicle. 

Russia in Transformation 

By ARTHUR J. BROWN, D.D. 
12mo, cloth, net $1.00 
" We have more reason to be interested in Russia just now 
than in any other country except our own. Doctor Brown 
writes with discrimination and brings into its proper relation 
with the story those spiritual features which are so important 
and so little understood." — The Advance. 

" A timely book full of just the questions that everybody is 
asking about Russia." — Congregationalist, 



How Would Jesus Regard a "Slacker "? 

What Did Jesus Really Teach 
About War 

By EDWARD LEIGH PELL 

12nio, cloth, net $1.00 

C " Capital," says Colonel Theodore Roosevelt. " I 

wish every religious man could read it." 

" A book to stir the sluggish, to wake the sleepers, to right- 
about everyone toward the righteousness of the present war 
in behalf of a larger liberalism, a truer freedom." 

— Washington Star. 

" Not merely frank, but vigorous and such as to lead one 
to see Christ's teaching in a clearer light." 

—N. Y. Evening Post. 

TAPS: A Book IZ Boys in Khaki 

By J. GREGORY MANTLE, D.D. 

12mo, cloth, net $1.25 

C A soldier's ** book of information " and help not in 

the " Manual." A work of great interest and value in 

the fight for Christ and Freedom. 

A book written expressly for Uncle Sam's boys. It deals 
with the salient evils and temptations which await the young 
soldier just joining the colors. The author's son is among 
the boys in the National army for whom this book sounds the 
alarm and points out the road to victory. 

What tlie War is Teaching 

By CHARLES E. JEFFERSON. D.D. 
12mo, cloth, net $1.00 
C " The words of Dr. Charles E. Jefferson ought to 
be nailed to the doorposts of every Christiem mem- 
ory." — Harry Emerson Fosdic\. 

" The nature of war, its effect upon man, its effect upon 
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passion and a wealth of information which holds the interest, 
A challenging note which men ought to hear." , 

— Congregationalism ! 



Over Five Million copies of a Pamphlet containing striking 
portions of this book are being distributed to the soldiers of 
America and Britain. 

German Atrocities 

HOW A NATION LOST ITS SOUL 

By NEWELL DWIGHT HILLIS 
Many Phttographs of Reproductions of Affidavits, Diaries, Scenes, etc. 

12mo» cloth, net $1.00 
Theodore Roosevelt says: ** I wish every one in this 
nation could hear this indictment." The conditions 
thus described by an unimpeachable witness should 
wake every man and woman in America. 

" Dr. Hillis tells of the cold-blooded murder of babies, little 
girls and boys and their mothers, by German soldiers and 
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devastation of whole districts; of the torture of French 
soldiers and Red Cross workers." — Indianapolis News. 

Studies of the Great War 

WHAT EACH NATION HAS AT STAKE 

By NEWELL DWIGHT HILLIS 
12mo, cloth, net $1.20 
" A true index of American sentiment and a brilliant 
statement of facts." — N. Y. Times, 

Facing the Hindenburg Line 

Being Personal Observations at the Fronts and in the Camps 

of the British, French, Americans, and Italians, 

During the Campaigns of 1917 

By BURRIS A. JENKINS 
12mo, cloth, net $1.25 
C In the dual capacity of war-correspondent and 
Y. M. C. A. lecturer, Mr. Jenkins has had exceptional 
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has set down what he saw and heard among the 
Frenchmen at Verdun, on the British Front, in Northern 
France and Flanders, with the Italian Armies around 
Gorizia. Mr. Jenkins* book is marked throughout by 
a deep sincerity and descriptive powers away above 
the ordinary. A live, stirring account of life in the 
European war zone. 



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